What do you know about Facebook except it offers you a platform where you can connect with your loved ones sitting miles away or can make new friends? I am sure that you’re also aware of the fact that it is run by Mark Zuckerberg and his ex-deputy Sheryl Sandberg. Since Facebook owns WhatsApp and Instagram and tracks users across all these platforms, it knows every single thing about you that includes things you might not even remember.
Moreover, the Facebook Artificial Intelligence powered algorithm is designed to keep the users stuck to the platform for more retention time. It sucks the users into the content of their interests.
Sheryl Sandberg
Facebook is believed to be the most potent tool of communication. Almost half the world’s population, 2.8 billion people, have signed up in it, and is worth more than a trillion dollars. But who made this success possible? Who is the real brain behind Facebook’s evil algorithm? Well, it’s Sheryl Sandberg.
Facebook’s chief operating officer Sheryl Sandberg has recently announced that she will be leaving the social network as she wants to pursue humanitarian work. Her announcement comes as unfortunate news for Facebook when the social media platform is facing multiple problems and competition as well.
Ms. Sheryl Sandberg joined Facebook when it was just a start-up. She superintended the online sales and operations during her stint between 2001 and 2008 to build the platform’s advertising empire. At Google, Ms. Sandberg was in charge of the company’s AdWords and AdSense.
At Facebook, she helped build a multi-billion dollar advertising empire, and made the social network a giant. It was her idea “to micro target users based on their interests and activities logged on Facebook’s website.”
It was Sandberg’s strategy that “over 97% of Facebook’s revenue in 2021 came from selling ads.” But, in 2018, several reports surfaced that the data of Facebook users were used without their consent for political advertising. Britain-based consulting firm Cambridge Analytica, which also managed former U.S. President Donald Trump’s 2016 election campaign, agreed that “it used nearly 30 million personally identifiable data of users from Facebook.”
Read more: Facebook is dying a very slow and excruciating death
The controversy changed how Facebook was generally perceived, and many of the users also left the platform to protect themselves from the political breach. Ms. Sheryl Sandberg is involved in the privacy breach as Facebook has been designed in a way to ensure more retention time to collect data of the users. Under her leadership, the platform continued to witness fake news.
Facebook’s attack on users’ privacy
People have long accused Facebook and its various other platforms of exploiting user data and sharing unauthorised information.
Earlier in 2021, Whatsapp had updated its user policy, which gave the platform the right to share user’s information with Facebook and other third-party apps. What is worse about this new policy is that the new update comes with a condition that if the user refuses to share data with Facebook, they will have to quit WhatsApp. In other words, the messaging application is forcing the users to accept a policy which exploits their personal data.
A case reportedly was filed in 2012 and is connected to a 2010 update by Facebook called “Open Graph”. The update was designed to give users’ friends a closer look at their activity and interests across the internet. Under the new update, the company launched a “Like” button plug-in on sites across the internet.
This “Like” button plug-in aided Facebook to gather data, using cookies, about users’ activity on that site. As per the court documents, this occurred regardless of whether the user actually used the button or even knew it was there.
However, the company attempted to whitewash the crime and said at the time that “It would not collect user-identifying cookies about a user’s activity on partner websites while they were logged out of Facebook.”
But researchers found that Facebook did not do so, and continued to collect some identifying cookies on users’ internet activity even after they logged out of the platform.
Facebook is built to get more retention time
Facebook made money by selling ads. Thus, Facebook’s shareholders would want to keep you on the site as long as possible. The more you are on Facebook, the more they make money.
Whatever interests you based on what you had earlier searched for or clicked on, Facebook network will learn and will give you more and more of it in order to get more retention time.
Facebook shows us the information based on our interests, encouraging us to view more.
That’s why it becomes easy for the AI algorithms from Facebook to spread false and misleading information, polarizing content, and conspiracy theories.
Facebook traps people. Since the ad department was handled by Sheryl Sandberg, it’s only her who is responsible for all the chaos Facebook has created.