Once again, Mark Zuckerberg is sorry.
The founder of Facebook, who has apologized for privacy breaches throughout much of his company’s existence, is back at it, on a much larger stage than ever before.
The proximate cause is the Cambridge Analytica controversy. In violation of Facebook’s rules, the Trump-linked political consultancy schemed to get access to the data of 87 million users. This has made Facebook a scapegoat for Trump’s victory on par with the Russians and James Comey (at least before the FBI director got fired and became a Trump adversary).
In 2012, Barack Obama’s re-election campaign did a less-underhanded version of the same thing as Cambridge. The great chronicler of the Obama digital operation, Sasha Issenberg, wrote of how its “ ‘targeted sharing’ protocols mined an Obama backer’s Facebook network in search of friends the campaign wanted to register, mobilize, or persuade.”
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