I find the story on Cambridge Analytica and Facebook data leakage (it is not a breach or hack), fascinating. More so, the call to #deletefacebook is nothing but hypocrisy.

I will group my views on this as 3, 2, 1 below.

I am restricting my post to the discussion about Facebook & Social Media, I have no knowledge or opinion about Cambridge Analytica or its activities.

Three things that I believe:

  1. These companies are run by people not interested in stealing – my money (that I have in my bank account) or my stuff that I didn’t offer it to them
  2. They are not #evil, just companies that have a fiduciary duty to their shareholders to maximise profits and they will do so in every way that’s possible and legal (and whenever they know they won’t get caught or the fines will be small). Historically companies and traders always did this and in this case, these companies are trading data, that’s all.
  3. We have a contract with these companies – we get the services for free, they use our usage data to earn $$$ through advertisement and other marketing. Remember, engineers and cloud servers don’t come free.

Two commandments of being social, that I keep telling myself:

  1. Only post on #Facebook, #Twitter and to my #blog things that I want to share with the entire world, basically #publicity and not my secrets. If you want to keep a secret, use a password management app.
  2. As users, we need to remember, that whenever we browse any site on the Internet, Google & Facebook (and so does our ISP, Government and few others in the chain) pretty much know about it through their products – Gmail, Facebook, Google Search, Android, Chrome browser and so on.

One truth, that’s glaring at us:

  1. In this post-truth world, as citizens, we have given up on our respective governments and our rulers. We take it as a fact they are corrupt, they lie and deceive us. So we end searching the good and the truth with large companies that we love and have charismatic CEOs. Basically, we have interchanged expectation between our Government and a private company. If you can understand this, you will come around (just like me) why Self-Regulation never works and we need Regulations (under competent authorities) to oversee the powerful companies around the world.

Lastly, as a race (humans) are resilient – we will live through this and come stronger. We are living at an age (thanks to technology) that is the best humans have seen.

Be positive. Be Optimistic.

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