Glassdoor/Facebook
A Facebook employee walks past the company's unofficial motto.
- Facebook was responsible for a massive shift away from the idea that the internet is full of strangers and it's dangerous to share your data.
- It encouraged people to be super-social within its platform, because there's nothing wrong with sharing all your information with people you already know in real life.
- This turned out to be a terrible idea when combined with Facebook's early motto of "Move fast and break things."
- Facebook executives seem to know that this attitude towards sharing, integral to the company's growth, was a bad, naive thesis.
Remember when the concept of "stranger danger" applied to the internet? Pre-Facebook, it was common to have Hotmail or MySpace user names that were something like cuteface56, because the idea of volunteering your real name and location to complete strangers seemed insane.
Facebook reversed all of this and normalised the idea that sharing everything about yourself on the internet was normal, even beneficial and fun. It did this by upending the idea that the internet is full of strangers - Facebook centres on connecting you with people you already know in real life. With that apparently safe premise, what could go wrong with sharing huge amounts about yourself on the platform?
This pro-sharing attitude was coupled with an unofficial motto: "Move fast and break things."
It turns out that was a disastrous combination.
Facebook can lay the blame for all that is happening to the company right now on decisions it made a decade ago to pursue social sharing and growth at the expensive of privacy. That's becoming increasingly obvious as the details of how Cambridge Analytica harvested up to 50 million users' profiles come into focus.
To understand how this came about, we need to return to Facebook's first ever F8 developer conference in 2007, when the company was in "move fast" mode, and not thinking so much about how it might "break things."
At the time, a youthful Mark Zuckerberg announced Facebook Platform. This would open up Facebook - then at 24 million users - to third-party developers who could build fun games and apps that would make the service more fun to use. It was literally described as the "anti-Myspace," which didn't have much truck with third-party apps.
It was a huge deal for developers, who looked on at Facebook's growth in awe and now had access to a massive base of social media users. Even in 2007, Facebook had around 50- to 60 million users and this would grow more than six-fold by 2009.
In a 2008 interview, Mark Zuckerberg would say of Platform: "All we're trying to do in Facebook is take the social graph that already exists in the world and map it out ... Once it's mapped out, expose it in a way users are comfortable with to business applications."
According to former Facebook worker-turned-whistleblower Sandy Parakilas, Facebook was too caught up in trying to become a platform to bother with policing how third parties were using sensitive user information.
Parakilas was once Facebook Platform operations manager, overseeing how third-party developers accessed the site's user data. He blew the whistle to The Guardian about how the firm took minimal steps to protect that data, sacrificing privacy and security at the altar of growth. And speaking to British politicians during a select committee hearing on Wednesday, he said:
"The way I would characterise it: Its unofficial motto was move fast and break things. That was mostly around growth in the number of people who used the service. And at the time of the platform team, it was about growth in apps, growth in developers, building things very quickly and getting lots of people using the service ... The most popular apps had huge scale. Some of those apps asked for friend permissions. There was a huge amount of data that was being pulled out of Facebook as a result, and it was a concern to me."
The biggest misstep was letting those external apps scrape both user data and friend data, without people explicitly giving permission. Another was failing to take an interest in what developers might be doing with that data.
That lack of oversight allowed research firm Global Science Research to scrape data from thousands of Facebook users, then allegedly sell that information on to political research firm Cambridge Analytica, violating Facebook's rules.
"Once the data passed from Facebook's servers, Facebook lost insight into what was being done with the data, and lost control over [it.]," said Parakilas.
Now Facebook is paying the price, and its executives seem to know it. In a contrite Facebook post, the firm's vice president for consumer hardware Andrew Bosworth wrote something significant about its attitudes in 2014.
Here's what he wrote, emphasis ours:
"We thought that every app could be social. Your calendar should have your events and your friends birthdays, your maps should know where your friends live, your address book should show their pictures. It was a reasonable vision but it didn't materialize the way we had hoped. We made a change three years ago to limit developer access to detailed friend data."
And chief executive Mark Zuckerberg told Wired that not digging into the way Cambridge Analytica had accessed the firm's data was one of the "biggest mistakes that we made."
It probably isn't coincidence that Facebook started moving away from the "Move fast and break things" motto around the same time it realised unfettered social access might have consequences. But four years down the line, we should wonder what else Facebook broke.