It was way back in 2010 that Apple co-founder Steve Jobs was addressing the audience at the Wall Street Journal¡¯s D8 conference. At the time, journalist Walt Mossberg asked him about privacy concerns surrounding Google and Facebook, and whether the concept was viewed differently in Silicon Valley.
His answer, today, seem almost prophetic given Facebook's data privacy & Cambridge Analytica scandal we¡¯re dealing with right now.
¡°Privacy means people know what they're signing up for, in plain English and repeatedly,¡± Jobs says in the now resurfaced video. And if the irony wasn¡¯t enough already, it seems Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg was also in the audience at the time.
¡°I believe people are smart and some people want to share more data than other people do,¡± Jobs said at the time. ¡°Ask them. Ask them every time. Make them tell you to stop asking them if they get tired of your asking them. Let them know precisely what you're going to do with their data.¡±
It¡¯s exactly what Zuckerberg and Facebook went on to do the opposite of. While they may not exactly have hidden the details of what happens to your data, they did obscure the extent to which they were scraping it, as well as made it harder to get it all deleted. If that wasn¡¯t bad enough, the company also failed to notify users when Cambridge Analytica unethically harvested and manipulated the data of 50 million Facebook users years ago.
Unfortunately things are still pretty slow to change, even as Facebook begins to burn down around Zuckerberg¡¯s ears. Hopefully though, it¡¯ll get to the point of full transparency soon, before it hemorrhages most of its user base forever.