Facing backlash including congressional enquiry, embattled CEO of Facebook owned up data leakage to Cambrige Analytica as his personal mistake. “It was my mistake, and I’m sorry,” he said on the dais at a joint U.S. Senate committee hearing.
It did’nt really matter that the charges against him were actually breach of Trusts by Cambridge Analytica against Facebook and that he himself was a victim. It also didn’t matter that he could not have had a better security measure since this was the first time in human history when any entity has had the kind of information Facebook has had.
All the charges against Facebook were essentially that of opening their data trove to respected academician from one of the most respected Universities on planet to measure the possibilities of what can be done with that data. Now the academician went rogue and made a profit out of it.
The worst part of the charge is the fact that Cambridge Analytica does not have a proven success story in US presidential elections. Ted Cruz had dropped them for non-performance, even the Trump’s campaign didn’t (as per the documents in public domain) did not massively fund the company.
Worst of all there was no data leak per se. It was data analysis that the two billion Facebook users, voluntarily shared with the world. The fact that all our behaviour can be clubbed together and analysed has been known to researchers of chaos theory for ages. The fact it is now happening on biggest data bases is an eventuality waiting to happen. While democratic institutions may find themselves challenged the data – and information from it is just a discovery of under currents. If anything this data is levelling the playing fields wherein those in power had enormous state machinery collecting and providing similar (if now same ) data points.
Gut it does not matter, Zuckerberg has asked for forgiveness. By blaming the omnipresent Russian bear, he has also ensured it.
