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With great power comes great responsibility. Facebook chief Mark Zuckerberg is learning it the hard way as he testifies before two US Congressional committees, and scrambles to offer solutions on data privacy without endangering the business model that has made him the fifth richest man in the world with a net worth of over $60 billion.
He has owned up to his mistakes. A good start. He also apologised (through a written testimony to the Congress, Facebook post, interviews, advertisements) but is it enough? In his campaign to put every human online and wire the world, he innovated, harvested more data, and got over two billion people connected on FB. All this happened by bending the rules and crushing competition to stay on top of the heap.
Zuckerberg had underestimated the reach of his platform at first. When its popularity became overwhelming, he started making money. Now he is making the same mistake by underestimating the damage it has done by misrepresenting the facts about its usage.
How data is harvested, used and profited from lies at the heart of the problem, and should be addressed with the right legislation. Facebook has provided its users with land (in the virtual space), and users have built their homes (accounts) on it.
Rationally speaking, data is users' property; you do not enter anyone's house without permission or use the contents of the house without a nod from the owner. Still, Facebook and others have entered our virtual spaces and have taken from us what they have liked.
With data being the oil of the digital economy, techcolonialism is staring right at us through our smartphone screens, computers, tablets, and other devices. It is fun and has given credibility to a number of movements.
The Facebook phenomenon, however, is slowly taking us down. It is a moment of reckoning, not only for the social media giant, but also for other titans of the digital age. We are talking about Alphabet, Amazon, Microsoft, Apple, Samsung, and the likes who have significant data on people.
Big Tech cannot be expected to self-regulate, so governments must step in. They need to think ahead and devise regulations to protect us, but do they have the right skills and tools to undertake such a major overhaul?
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