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.
Vertical accountability
‘So then, each of us will give an account of ourselves to God.’ Romans 14.12 emphasises a threefold scheme of accountability:
• Universal – each of us must give account.
• Inevitable – each person must give account of himself to God.
• Personal – each of us needs to give account of himself or herself.
Talking about others is often an easy way to deflect from our own lives. Therefore, the fact that nothing is hidden from God’s sight and that we will each be held accountable for our own actions give us pause for thought.
Accountability is what holds society together and what makes it function. Scripture emphasises the need for responsibility where there is power. The greater the power, the greater should be the responsibility and accountability. Consequently, if those in power create structures that enable them to escape responsibility, biblical alarm bells ring.
Horizontal accountability
‘As iron sharpens iron, so one person sharpens another.’ Proverbs 27.17 asks us to hold others accountable. At the time Scripture was written this was supposedly more straightforward: if someone’s brother, who lived in the same village, sinned, the consequences became immediately obvious and a strong oral culture ensured that word went around.
Human nature in a fallen world makes checks and balances essential. We need others to grow in Christ and also to function properly. For good reasons the UK political structure and the US constitution were informed by views of the pervasiveness of sin and so checks and balances were put in to limit the power of any one individual (regardless of their confessed intentions).
Mark Zuckerberg owns approximately 16% of Facebook, but has 60% of its voting power via a special class of stock. Proverbs 27 is a salutary warning that such a situation is asking for trouble. It is vital that we have horizontal accountability mechanisms in place when structuring corporate entities, in order to ensure limitation of power when the flaws in human nature prevail.
Platforms & individual responsibility
All this leads to important questions:
• To what extent are we aware of how Facebook and other social media platforms share data and track our online activity?
•Has the desire to connect led to exploitation as we have entrusted social networks with our memories and life experiences without scrutiny?
• How can we best practice accountability in a world where corporate-owned platforms have become the cornerstone of civic life and where data trajectories are often blurry?
We could firstly consider what platforms we use and how we use them. Why not seek ways to cut out the corporate intermediary and share content directly? Good news! With the recent enforcement of GDPR (General Data Protection Regulation) we have the opportunity to build a more transparent ecosystem that, with combined effort, could have the biblical hallmarks of universal, inevitable and personal accountability at its core whilst providing a system of peer-to-peer checks and balances.
