Can it be said that Facebook Inc. lacks awareness that it is a company handling a huge amount of private information?
Information on about 50 million people is suspected to have been leaked via Facebook, the world's largest social media service. It can be said that it is a serious incident.
The information was collected via an app made by a Britain-based researcher for psychological analysis tests. About 300,000 people, who took part in the tests, were asked about their characteristics while their ages and places of residence were collected at the same time. The information also includes an enormous volume of personal data about friends of the test participants.
The researcher provided the collected data to a British firm in violation of Facebook regulations that ban providing data to a third party without permission. This firm worked with the campaign of then candidate Donald Trump during the 2016 U.S. presidential election.
The British company insists that it did not use the data for election campaigns because it destroyed the data after the violation was pointed out in 2015. But the fact that it received the data in the first place is problematic.
The researcher is primarily to blame for the alleged leakage of information but Facebook cannot be immune from its supervisory responsibility over the researcher.
The number of daily users of Facebook has reached 1.4 billion. The users, who registered their attributes such as real names and occupations, post daily activities and thoughts to communicate with others. The quality and quantity of personal data Facebook possesses is unmatched.
Corporate responsibility
During the U.S. presidential campaign, fake news spread via Facebook. Russia is said to have posted advertisements aimed at manipulating public opinion. The danger of Facebook being abused increases because it has a huge power of influence.
Facebook has repeatedly caused such incidents as information leaks. It has taken improvement measures whenever an incident occurred, but it cannot be denied that they have been stopgap steps.
The U.S. government, for its part, stopped short of strengthening controls while giving weight to voluntary measures to be taken by social media providers. Behind this could be the U.S. culture of respecting the freedom of corporate activities.
Social media, exemplified by Facebook, have evolved into a form of massive infrastructure. For this very reason, social media providers must fulfill corporate responsibility to match this position in society. If they cannot introduce an adequate control system, a certain degree of supervision by administrative authorities will be necessary.
The U.S. Fair Trade Commission will launch an investigation into the information leak scandal involving Facebook. The FTC is called on to elucidate the entire picture of the scandal and give instructions to prevent a recurrence of similar incidents.
There are also many social media service users in Japan. With the enforcement of the revised Private Information Protection Law, use of personal information is widely controlled.
Nevertheless, social media users are required to recognize the present situation in which the data on them is used for business purposes and assume a stance of thinking carefully about the information they provide.
(From The Yomiuri Shimbun, April 1, 2018)
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