[BreachExchange] Timeline: Facebook becomes the Uber of 2018

[Audrey McNeil]

https://www.usatoday.com/story/tech/news/2018/03/20/timeline-facebook-2018/
441449002/

Last year was Uber's terrible, horrible, no-good, very bad year. The tech
company holding that title in 2018 is Facebook.

Much like Uber, which started off 2017 weathering a #deleteUber campaign
over its action during President Trump's travel ban, Facebook is dealing
with its own scandal and calls by users to drop the service.

Late last week, Facebook admitted it knew, but didn't notify users, that
political intelligence firm Cambridge Analytica had obtained data on
hundreds of thousands of Facebook users without their consent. It made this
disclosure on the eve of investigative articles in the New York Times and
The Guardian's The Observer, which detailed a scheme by the Trump
campaign-linked firm to tap likes and posts from tens of millions of
unwitting users to predict how they would vote.

Backlash against the abuse of user privacy was swift, with regulators,
privacy experts and lawmakers calling for tighter regulations,
investigations and company executives to step up.

The Cambridge Analytica scandal is the latest in what has been a rough year
for Facebook. Here's a recap:

January 11: Facebook unveils significant changes to its News Feed aimed at
bumping up social interactions between friends and family over news
articles, videos, or what they consider passive engagement. The overhaul
came in response to increasing pressure Facebook endures over its
potentially negative impact on society, from sharing violent videos to
letting fake news run unchecked to its late acknowledgement that Russian
operatives had used to platform to target U.S. voters.

January 23: Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff said Facebook should face
regulationscompared to cigarette companies for its addictive properties.
"Technology has addictive qualities that we have to address, and that
product designers are working to make those products more addictive and we
need to rein that back," Benioff told CNBC.

January 31: Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg confirmed a drop in the time users
spent on the platform following big changes its to News Feed. During
Facebook's fourth quarter earnings call, he said it amounted to users
spending 50 million fewer hours each day.

February 5: Former employees of Facebook and Google help launch the
education campaign The Truth About Tech to explore tech addiction and the
mental health consequences of using social media. "They've created the
attention economy and are now engaged in a full-blown arms race to capture
and retain human attention, including the attention of kids," said former
Google design ethicist Tristan Harris.

February 12: Research firm eMarketer found Facebook was losing younger
users at a faster rate to messaging app Snapchat than first realized. The
firm found less than half of U.S. Internet users ages 12 to 17 will use
Facebook this year for the first time.

February 16: Facebook moves forward with its Messenger Kids app despite
calls from critics to shut it down for attempting to pull kids toward its
services at too young an age. The app is targeted to kids under 13 and lets
parents approve who their kids message.

February 18: More than a quarter of Americans in a recent online survey
said Facebook should receive a fine for its role in Russian interference
during the 2016 presidential election.

February 23: Facebook apologized for featuring violent VR video games at
its booth during the Conservative Political Action Conference. The event
took place days after shootings at a high school in Parkland, Fla., left 17
people dead.

March 5: Facebook comes under fire for a user survey which asked whether
pedophiles should be able to proposition underage girls for sexually
explicit photographs on the service. "It shouldn't have been part of this
survey," said Guy Rosen, a vice president of product for Facebook.

March 14: The Federal Election Commission said it would start writing new
disclosure rules for online ads in response to revelations Russian
interests bought content on Facebook and other platforms in an attempt to
meddle with the 2016 election.

March 16: Facebook found itself apologizing again after users discovered
typing "video of" in the search bar would lead to inappropriate results
when autocomplete was triggered. Facebook said it's investigating what
caused the results to pop up.

March 17: One day after Facebook announced it had suspended Cambridge
Analyticafor improper access to user data, The New York Times and The
Observer said the political consultancy had access to 50 million profiles
and used them to target ads during the 2016 election. Facebook said it knew
Cambridge had violated its policies by obtaining the data, which users had
agreed to share with a personality prediction app that then, secretly,
passed them on.

Facebook defended keeping users in the dark by saying it had thought
Cambridge had deleted the data — and because it didn't qualify as a data
breach, since users had agreed to share their data with the quiz app. That
response didn't sit well with lawmakers, regulators and privacy activists.

March 19 Democrat Senators Edward Markey and Richard Blumenthal called for
hearings into the situation and for the Federal Trade Commission to
investigate. Then three Republican Senators send a letter to Facebook CEO
Mark Zuckerberg demanding questions about the privacy breach answered, in
writing. The calls echo lawmaker demands in other parts of the world.
Shares dropped 7%, the worst drop in four years.

March 20 The Federal Trade Commission probes potential misuse of data.
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