About 2 billion Facebook users have been surveyed and profiled.
Algorithms shape not only our purchasing decisions and taste profiles, but also our voting behaviour. Your own personal data might even have been misused in the Cambridge Analytica leak. The recent scandal suggests that, with the power of multinationals and their large-scale data harvesting technologies, we find ourselves in an accountability crisis.
Facebook’s apologies
In the 14 years of its existence, Facebook has apologised various times for breaching users’ privacy. First, in 2004 when the Facebook News Feed was launched without giving users control over the feature. In the last eight years Facebook has had ten sets of legal issues (excluding the Facebook Analytics scandal). Yet despite a series of apologies the social network giant has continued to operate in a way leading to breaches of the Data Protection Act and even compromising foundational democratic principles.
