On Facebook and Globalization

Photo by Business Insider UK

As someone who finds data-driven technology as the prime mover of the future, I think that it's apt to look at our how we consume and get consumed by its very nature. 

After all, there's still much that's left think about when it comes to our boundaries in the online world. 

With that, one can recall Facebook’s latest issue with regards to a data firm called Strategic Communication Laboratories (SCL) and its subsidiary Cambridge Analytica, which provided the Donald Trump presidential campaign with digital voter outreach services. 

Aleksandr Kogan, a Russian-American psychology professor, was said to be the person behind the act. Initially, he created a Facebook app which harvested more than 270,000 user data from a personality quiz that was linked to users' Facebook profiles. From there, Aleksandr Kogan was reported to have transferred the data to Cambridge Analytica. 

Now, more than 50 million user data have been collected through his app since even the friends of users have been affected, but what makes the situation more detrimental is that majority of Facebook users are not fully aware that such a phenomenon is possible. 

Facebook isn't completely new to this, since the company has already been into numerous controversies starting from the release of the News Feed. 

Although the News Feed eventually became a part of Facebook, it still wasn't free from encountering major problems such as that of the algorithm's tendency to emphasize fake news over others. 

As the CEO, Mark Zuckerberg has continually made efforts with his team to prevent privacy breaches and misinformation from happening and spreading despite the backlash being thrown at Facebook. Mark himself believes that the most important thing they should do is to "develop the social infrastructure to give people the power to build a global community." 

Evidently, they have been successful in connecting billions of people in the world, but what makes Facebook a global phenomenon is its intrusion to human emotion, the rawest and most common form of connection that everyone can perceive regardless of race, gender and socioeconomic status. Despite that, the social platform's powerful ability to magnetize its users is seen as a double-edged sword. It can maximize your sources of information as well as communication on one end, but it also makes you vulnerable to privacy breaches and misinformation on another. The lack of laws in securing private data online allows this phenomenon to happen, and the possibilities of further exploitation is not far from happening. 

In the end, how can technological globalization truly secure our lives, and who really is getting the upper hand when it comes to these advancements?