Report: Analyzing Global Leadership in the Facebook Privacy Crisis

This report delves into the Facebook privacy issue of 2019, examining the role of Mark Zuckerberg as a global leader. It discusses the scandal involving Cambridge Analytica's access to user data, exploring the context of data protection and privacy in the modern era. The report analyzes Zuckerberg's leadership style, identifying him as a transformational leader and assessing the successes and failures of his handling of the situation. It highlights the lack of leadership that contributed to the crisis, emphasizing the importance of responsible leadership in the digital age. The report concludes with recommendations for future leaders navigating the complexities of global business and data privacy, referencing leadership concepts and theories to provide a comprehensive analysis. The report is available on Desklib, a platform offering AI-based study tools for students.

Running head: GLOBAL LEADERSHIP
Global Leadership
Name of the Student:
Name of the University:
Author note:

1GLOBAL LEADERSHIP
1. Introduction
Leadership in the modern era demands living by enduring the principles that produce
success and then augmenting them with the new behaviours and qualities that can enable the
speed, risk-tasking, flexibility, obsession with the goals and high communication level within
a team or an organisation. 21st century world is all about technology, data, advancements,
innovation and creativity. Technology today is so advanced that it a company needs to plan
about its data protection and privacy first before even planning the business (Mokyr, Vickers
and Ziebarth 2015). The organisational leaders struggle with the challenges in various
different forms for the last two decades and have still to find out some generalizable
solutions. This paper shall elaborate on analysing a leadership situation and a leader who was
involved in it. It would be the situation related to global leadership within organisational
context. A brief description about the involvement of the leader shall be presented in this
report using some leadership concepts and theories. Based on the analysis of the very
situation, certain recommendations shall be developed for the future leadership who wish for
thriving as effective leaders in the modern complex and dynamic global business context. The
chosen situation for this purpose is that of Facebook Privacy Issue in the year 2019.
2. Discussion
2.1. About the situation
The selected situation is that of the very recent event of “Facebook Privacy Issue” that
took place in the beginning of the year 2019. It is considered to be one of the several privacy
issues that Facebook has had to deal with in such a short time of existence (Kulcu and Turkay
2014). The scandal was centred around the collection of personally identifiable information
of about 87 million individuals all around the world by the strategic communication and
political consulting company named “Cambridge Analytica” (Isaak and Hanna 2018). The

2GLOBAL LEADERSHIP
company was able to get access to the personally identifiable data and information by means
of a personality quiz application called the “thisisyourdigitallife”. The information that were
gathered by that application was useful in building some “psychographic” profiles of the
users and adding that application to their Facebook accounts for taking quizzes gave the
creator of the application easy access to the profile information as well as user history of the
users who used to take the quiz as well as their friends that they had on Facebook. The
company as well as the others were easily able to gain all the access to the personal data of
the Facebook users because of the confluence of different factors including lack of safeguards
against the firms that are engaged into data harvesting, very little to absolutely no oversight
of the developers of Facebook, Facebook users agreeing to the overly broad terms and
conditions and the developer abuse of the Facebook API.
According to the researchers this could be used for accurately predicting the different
range of highly sensitive personal attributes like ethnicity, sexual orientation, and
intelligence, use of any kind of addictive substances, political and religious views, personality
traits, happiness, sadness, gender, age, and parental separation. They noted that “less than 5%
of users labelled as gay were connected with explicitly gay groups," but that liking "Juicy
Couture" and "Adam Lambert" are likes indicative of gay men, while "WWE" and "Being
Confused After Waking Up From Naps" are likes indicative of straight men” (Schneble,
Elger and Shaw 2018).
2.2. Leaders involved and their involvement
It is Mark Zuckerberg, the CEO of Facebook who was responsible for the situation.
He was born in the year 1984 in White Plains, New York (Sorensen 2018). During his studies
in Harvard University, Mark dropped out of college for focusing on a social network project
and it was when he created Facebook, which each and every individual in this world is aware
with today. He is a highly motivated person who keeps a goal-oriented mind-set. He is highly

3GLOBAL LEADERSHIP
focused on leading his team for producing the best social media platform in the entire world.
All these years, it was the leadership of Zuckerberg that has influenced the success and
employee satisfaction of Facebook. He is also considered to be the youngest billionaire on the
planet and the CEO of Facebook, the world’s most popular website.
2.3. The global business context (the concept of leadership)
Seeing Facebook, the world’s most renowned company in the news and newspapers
facilitate the conversations around the leadership of the company, the business practices and
what does the term “privacy” actually means in the modern era. It is to note that Mark
Zuckerberg is a transformational leader and as a transformational leader, he has learned from
his mistakes, took immense risks in his life and has grown and developed his company as a
visionary leader. With the help of his self-determination, self-awareness and the help of his
mentors, Mark Zuckerberg has been successfully placed on the list of top ten CEOs in the
world and has built the most popular social network in the entire world. It is to mention that
transactional leaders always focus on maintaining a normal workflow of business operations,
neither more nor less. They use some disciplinary powers, awards and some array of
incentives for motivating their employees for performing their best. These types of leaders
are also highly focused and determined to satisfy their quotas on a daily basis. They tend to
go beyond their normal activities of daily and focus mainly on the creation of solid team of
employees by means of promoting team building. Firestone (2014) too in this context have
claimed that “transformational leaders motivate their employees through setting goals,
implementing incentives, and providing opportunities for personal and professional growth”.
He is widely known for being a motivator and a mentor who inspire his employees
and staffs with a clear goal and vision on the future of the company. With the same, he also
defines the different steps that are required for achieving those goals. His ideas are highly
disruptive and the level of confidence that he possess is worth applaud. He is a very

4GLOBAL LEADERSHIP
courageous and vigour individual. However, like any other leaders in the world, Mark too
had to face some challenges in his path of success. However, Mark Zuckerberg believes on
the notion that “great people who work with clear direction can produce positive results” and
therefore, he hires his employees on the basis of their passion of doing things and not their
skill set. As per him, “skills can be taught, passion cannot”. For helping with building his
style of leadership, Zuckerberg sought out for mentors who helped him in creating a vision
for his company. According to Andrew Bosworth, one of the Software engineers at
Facebook, the leadership style of Mark Zuckerberg is fearless, challenging and completely
tireless with a good reason. The results of his leadership style expose out some unthinkable
talents within the employees. McKenna and Intezari (2018) too have claimed that the
leadership style of Mark Zuckerberg could be regarded as aggressive, encouraging,
motivating and demanding.
2.4. Success of failure of the situation
The situation was a success as Mark Zuckerberg lost the trust of millions of Facebook
users. He apologizes and even gave his users the choice of opting out. In an apology he
explained his thought process. He took personal responsibility for letting the third parties
access the data of Facebook User without their permission and claimed that the company will
surely embark on a three year push for preventing it from taking place in the near future.
During a call with the reporters, he said “I started this place, I run it, I am the one responsible
for what happened here” (Carnes and Carnes 2014). No one had fired at the Facebook
Company during the Cambridge Analytica data leak scandal. However, at the same time, he
also admitted that the company did not do enough for focusing on the prevention of abuse
and minimising the impact of the platforms and this is surely a lack of action from his end
and is a huge mistake. The company has about 15,000 people who are working on the

5GLOBAL LEADERSHIP
security of the users and reviewing of the content and it will have about 20,000 by the end of
the year 2019.
The costs to Facebook in both the reputation and financial terms are very huge. It is
the target of Federal Trade Commission probe into whether it broke the 2011 agreement that
requires the user consent for sharing information and data and that carries penalties of about
40,000 dollars per violation. According to Bergmann and Venook (2018), “A bipartisan
coalition of 41 U.S. state attorneys general last week formally requested details from
Facebook about the Cambridge Analytica case, to determine if it violated consumer-
protection laws.” Facebook also faced many lawsuits from its users and shareholders over the
leak of unauthorised data. Mark Zuckerberg continuously apologised for the mess that he as a
leader, let to be created.
2.5. How the lack of leadership aided to the occurrence of the situation
Alarmed at the increasing industria data complex of Google, Amazon, Facebook,
among the other big internment firms, Sir Tim Berners Lee declared a war on these firms
striving for bringing the data control back to the users who generated it in the first place.
Facebook is a widely known social media platform. It has its headquarters in MenloPark,
California and every Friday it holds a question-answer session for its users and employees
working under. It is a type of forum that encourages open discussion where Mark Zuckerberg
is known for sharing his personal thoughts on the direction of the company. Many of his
employees have claimed that the leadership style of Mark Zuckerberg is fearless, challenging
and completely tireless with a good reason and as already mentioned, with the help of his
self-determination, self-awareness and the help of his mentors, he has been successfully
placed on the list of top ten CEOs in the world and has built the most popular social network
in the entire world. However, time and time again Facebook has made it abundantly clear that
it is “a morally bankrupt company that is never going to change unless it is forced to” (Eccles

6GLOBAL LEADERSHIP
and Serafeim 2017). It has also made it very clear that it thinks it can get away with anything
as its users are fools. Zuckerberg too famously called the first Facebook users “dumb” for
“handing their personal information over to him; his disdain for the people whose data he
deals with doesn’t appear to have lessened over time” (). Facebook has faced such issues
numerous time since its existence but nothing before has threatened it like the Cambridge
Analytica scandal. As () says, “The power of data is sometimes a hard thing to understand,
and this incident woke people up to that”.
In contemporary world, which is a more global village, responsible leadership is of
the utmost importance, particularly from the businesses like Facebook that make use of
digital platforms. In such a super connected world, there is hardly anyone who would have
escaped the news that Facebook, the most famous social media platforms in the world, has
misused the personal information of its users at a large scale. Majority of the viewers watched
in disbelief the evidence that was mounting that Facebook has allowed personal data and
information of its users to be used for the political purposes and gradually went into shock
when it was revealed that how the Facebook profiles had been data mined. According to
Mark Zuckerberg, he has “privacy focused vision for social networking”. In several blog
postings, he claimed that he have been repeatedly shown that he can evolve towards building
the services that the modern generation want, including the private stories and messaging. He
also claimed that the future of communication would increasingly shift towards private and
encrypted services where people could be confident about what they say to one another and
all those things would be kept secured. However, the privacy scandals that Facebook has
engaged in from long time seems at odds with these claims of Mark Zuckerberg who says
that “Facebook is an innovator in privacy”. According to Mark, “All of the success that
Facebook has had... has been because we've given people new private or semi-private ways to
communicate things that they wouldn't have had before". Erdem (2018) in this context have

7GLOBAL LEADERSHIP
opposed the claims of Mark Zuckerberg and have opined that Facebook would never ever be
known as a champion in terms of data privacy.
3. Conclusion
Hence, from the above analysis it is clear that Zuckerberg is a leader who embodies
the characteristic of transformational leader. His transformational leadership style continuous
to make Facebook to a promising future. He has highly flourished as a leader and he
effectively understands and motivates the continuous growth within his company. He is
widely known for being a motivator and a mentor who inspire his employees and staffs with a
clear goal and vision on the future of the company and he hires his employees on the basis of
their passion of doing things and not their skill set. Zuckerberg sought out for mentors who
helped him in creating a vision for his company and his leadership style expose out some
unthinkable talents within the employees. However, the scandal of privacy issue of 2019 have
significantly hampered the reputation of the company of Mark Zuckerberg- Facebook.
Facebook has some decade long tracks of different incidents that highlight insufficient and
inadequate measures for protecting the data privacy. While the seriousness of the individual
cases differs, the sequence of the repeated failures paints a bigger picture of some systematic
problems. All these have questioned the leadership and the potential of Mark Zuckerberg to
stop a serious issue from taking place.
4. Recommendations
1. It is recommended that Facebook should move with the times and must recognise the
ever increasing expectations of its users for more control over their data and information
and the ones who uses them and for what purpose.
2. Secondly, it is to suggest that Facebook should change its business mode instead of
continuously subtracting data from its users. Although it might result in declination of

8GLOBAL LEADERSHIP
some financial results of the company but it would be worth it. Its Current business
model depends on the people volunteering the information, even if they do not know
what the scope and depth of their disclosures could actually mean if the data were used.
As the outcome of the FTC action, services like that of Facebook should continue with
some plentiful new privacy options and disclosures for the users. Users should be given
the full right to expect legislative actions around the deletion of data whenever
requested.
3. Facebook should not only improve its privacy controls by implementing strict controls
and systems but also ensure that each and every users of it is well- aware of the system.
4. Facebook must take user consent for sharing information and data prior to do anything.
This will help the company in building the lost trust of its users.

9GLOBAL LEADERSHIP
References:
Bergmann, Max, and Jeremy Venook. "Conspiracy Against the United States." (2018).
Carnes, Mark C., and Mark Christopher Carnes. Minds on fire: How role-immersion games
transform college. Harvard University Press, 2014.
Eccles, Robert G., and George Serafeim. "Corporate and integrated reporting: A functional
perspective." In Corporate stewardship, pp. 156-171. Routledge, 2017.
Erdem, Bora. "FREE SPEECH AND FACEBOOK: THE D." Journal of Current
Research 10 (2018): 12.
Firestone, William A. "Teacher evaluation policy and conflicting theories of
motivation." Educational researcher 43, no. 2 (2014): 100-107.
Isaak, Jim, and Mina J. Hanna. "User Data Privacy: Facebook, Cambridge Analytica, and
Privacy Protection." Computer 51, no. 8 (2018): 56-59.
Külcü, Özgür, and Türkay Henkoğlu. "Privacy in social networks: An analysis of
Facebook." International Journal of Information Management 34, no. 6 (2014): 761-769.

10GLOBAL LEADERSHIP
McKenna, Bernard, and Ali Intezari. "Power, politics and influence." Leadership: Regional
and Global Perspectives(2018): 190.
Mokyr, Joel, Chris Vickers, and Nicolas L. Ziebarth. "The history of technological anxiety
and the future of economic growth: Is this time different?." Journal of Economic
Perspectives 29, no. 3 (2015): 31-50.
Schneble, Christophe Olivier, Bernice Simone Elger, and David Shaw. "The Cambridge
Analytica affair and Internet‐mediated research." EMBO reports 19, no. 8 (2018).
Sorensen, Lita. Mark Zuckerberg and Priscilla Chan: Top Couple in Tech and Philanthropy.
Enslow Publishing, LLC, 2018.