Data Mining by Facebook and Google: Who is Responsible for Data Breach?

Running Head: Computer Information System
Facebook & Google
Computer Information System
Essay

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Essay
(Source: Russell, 2018)
Social networking sites came into existence in the early 2000s, since then there
was a huge expansion in the social media platforms and the clear winners have
been Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat & Twitter. The global digital snapshot
above here shows the penetration of Internet across the globe which forms the
preamble of the essay here. In a world with a population of 7.476 Billion, there
are 3.773 Billion Internet users (50% Penetration) and the total active media
users are 2.789 Billion (37%). This shows the extent to which Social media and
Internet has penetrated in the daily lives of people. The purpose of the essay
here is discuss whether Facebook, Google and other social media organization
can be blamed for their data mining operation when the users are willing to
share the information online.
The line “Customer is King” has become lacklustre and has certainly been
replaced by “Data is the new King” in the present times. Global, national and
domestic organizations across the globe have tweaked their business models to
have a right fitment with the changing times. Social media marketing is
extensively used not only by Internet companies but a large number of
organization are using the fruits of social media and Internet to increase the

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product and brand awareness but also help in pushing the sales of its product.
Platforms such as Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, Twitter and Google are the
biggest contributors behind the success of the organization and also to push the
envelope of customer services (Debatin et. al., 2018)
Organization are spending plethora of Human and Financial resources to improve
the customer experience and their journey with the business organization. In
order to do so, data mining is playing the most important role. Data in the
simplest form can be understood as a general concept which refers to the fact
that certain existing information or knowledge is represented or coded in some
form which is better suited for further usage and processing. Hence, data is
extremely important in the present data. Business organization are buying a lot
of data online from the Third party App creators or illegally mining data or
involved in theft from the behemoth of social media and search engine.
However, if all this is done to help the consumer in making better decisions, it is
really advantageous, but, it is not the case anymore. Data is being illegally being
traded or being acquired from social media and search engine behemoth by the
usage of third party app developers (Gerlitz & Helmond, 2018).
Data mining is a process which is used by companies to turn raw data into
information which can be better used by the organization for the advantage of
not only the company but also its consumers. Able and efficient usage of
software to identify the patterns in large batches of data, businesses have the
opportunity of learning more about their consumers which help them in creating
effective marketing strategies and also help in determining the future
trends(Dwyer, Hiltz & Passerini, 2017).
Social media and specifically Facebook and Google have become the largest
storehouse of consumer’s data. Facebook has over 1.2 billion Active Facebook
users, who willingly share their information on the platform. Facebook through its
app and privacy notification ask the questions if they are willing to share their
information online, to which they willingly respond in a yes. Thus, Facebook not
only has information of consumers in terms of his age, sex, education, job,
location but has a lot of control over the user’s entire online journey. Social
logins have become hugely popular ad users in order to get an easy access to
other application give permission to the Facebook and other social media
platforms which makes the user data easily available to this third party

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application who have been using this data to their advantage. Due to this
willingly sharing of information with other application, Data mining of Facebook
will be on an increasing trend even in the coming years (Barbier & Liu, 2016).
In one of the recent data mining scandal at Facebook by one of the organization
Cambridge analytica took not only the company but the entire country by a
storm. It posed a very serious privacy concern in regards to the data of billions of
consumers who have been using the Facebook platform without any fear of any
kind of data leak. However, Cambridge analytica was not the first one who has
been exploiting this easy access to the data, even in the past plethora of third
party app developers have informed Facebook on the possibility of data leak, to
which Mark Zuckerberg turned a blind eye(Cohen, 2018).
Cambridge Analytica in particular was one such incident which impacted the
data of around 50 million Facebook users through a third party personality quiz
application. The users were literally clueless of this data leak and without their
explicit consent, due to the policies of Facebook at that time; data was passed
on to the firm. The firm then used the user’s data and build detailed user profiles
of Facebook users, which was then used to create micro-targeted political ads
with the intention of swinging the result in the favour of one of the candidates in
2016 US elections. The impact of this data breach cannot be however found with
utmost certainty, but the bigger picture here is the breach of data/confidence of
the users on Facebook. Facebook received strong flak due to this incident on
social media platforms such as Twitter and Facebook itself. It got to another level
when one of the present business leaders Elon Musk deleted his Facebook
account due to the security issue, and commented that he had no idea their
company even had a Facebook account. Such news not only hampers the
reputation of such behemoth social media platform but also affects its business
considerably by losing the faith and trust of the consumers (Jin, Lin, Luo & Han,
2016).
Mark Zuckerberg, CEO of Facebook was summoned by the FBI and was
questioned for over a couple of hours on his stance on the issue and his future
strategy to stop such mis-happenings in the future. Facebook was further drilled
because it was pointed that if only 270,000 people played the quiz on the
application, how it was possible that data of 50 million users was compromised.
Data of friends, families and relatives of the people who played the quiz was also