Facebook Data Misuse Could Dampen Tool’s Marketing Utility

The dust has barely begun to settle on the aftermath of Facebook’s disclosure that 50 million of its users had their data disclosed to a third party, and some experts are beginning to speculate about the impact the event will have on the country’s leading marketing tool for small businesses.

According to Facebook, in 2013, “a Cambridge University researcher named Aleksandr Kogan created a personality quiz app. It was installed by around 300,000 people who shared their data as well as some of their friends’ data. Given the way our platform worked at the time, this meant Kogan was able to access tens of millions of their friends’ data.”

Kogan then shared that data with a political consulting firm, Cambridge Analytica, for political campaign marketing purposes, and that was disclosed this week by several global media organizations.

The disclosure has caused many social media privacy experts and news media influencers to recommend that Facebook users review their privacy settings and how they interact with apps that companies use on Facebook.

David Kirkpatrick, CEO of New York-based conference and media company Techonomy Media, and followed by more than 100,000 Facebook users, believes the incident has caused a “toxic decline in trust” between users and the company.

Some industry leaders are even calling for a Facebook boycott. Brian Acton, co-founder of messaging service WhatsApp, which Facebook purchased in 2014, launched the #deleteFacebook campaign on Mar. 20 via Twitter.

Facebook marketers already took a hit early this year when Facebook announced that it would further deprioritize unpaid business posts in the newsfeeds of its users. There are approximately 230 million Facebook users in the U.S.

Facebook marketing utility for agents uncertain
While some social media leaders believe users will pull back from Facebook, many marketing experts believe that Facebook is too entrenched as a social media platform. They say that while consumers may tweak their privacy settings, making them less reachable through marketing campaigns, travel agents will still be able to target Facebook users.

“I don’t believe Facebook is going away, even though the scandal is really bad and has breached public trust,” said Myrna Arroyo, principal consultant at Pepper Inbound Marketing in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. Arroyo’s firm works with small businesses, especially travel companies.

“I see possible regulation coming. But for a travel advisor marketing on Facebook, I don’t see a huge impact. We’re already dealing with reduced visibility in the newsfeed, but those who are willing to invest in ads can still reach their prospects effectively on the platform,” she said.

To help mitigate both a privacy pullback from the scandal and the Facebook organic newsfeed changes, Arroyo advises her clients to convert their followers on social media into sales leads by asking for emails, getting them subscribed to a blog, and other tactics that move potential customers deeper into the sales funnel.

“That way if Facebook were to shut down one day, you’d still be able to reach your prospects,” she said.

Meanwhile, Facebook says it is investigating the breach of user data.

Zuckerberg vows to protect users
On Wednesday, Mar. 21, after two days of bad news about his company, Facebook CEO and founder Mark Zuckerberg posted on his personal page, offering both a timeline of events, and tactics the company has employed to protect user data. Zuckerberg claimed that “the most important actions to prevent this from happening again today, we have already taken years ago. But we also made mistakes, there’s more to do, and we need to step up and do it.”

“In 2014, to prevent abusive apps, we announced that we were changing the entire platform to dramatically limit the data apps could access. Most importantly, apps like Kogan’s could no longer ask for data about a person’s friends unless their friends had also authorized the app. We also required developers to get approval from us before they could request any sensitive data from people. These actions would prevent any app like Kogan’s from being able to access so much data today.

In 2015, a British newspaper, The Guardian, told Facebook that Kogan had shared data from his app with Cambridge Analytica. “It is against our policies for developers to share data without people’s consent, so we immediately banned Kogan’s app from our platform, and demanded that Kogan and Cambridge Analytica formally certify that they had deleted all improperly acquired data. They provided these certifications.”

Then, last week, The Guardian, The New York Times and the U.K.’s Channel 4 told Facebook that Cambridge Analytica “may not have deleted the data as they had certified. We immediately banned them from using any of our services.”

According to Zuckerberg, “Cambridge Analytica claims they have already deleted the data and has agreed to a forensic audit by a firm we hired to confirm this. We’re also working with regulators as they investigate what happened.”

“This was a breach of trust between Kogan, Cambridge Analytica and Facebook. But it was also a breach of trust between Facebook and the people who share their data with us and expect us to protect it. We need to fix that,” Zuckerberg wrote.

Stricter rules underway for apps
Zuckerberg said that Facebook is investigating all apps that had access to large amounts of information, “and we will conduct a full audit of any app with suspicious activity. We will ban any developer from our platform that does not agree to a thorough audit. And if we find developers that misused personally identifiable information, we will ban them and tell everyone affected by those apps. That includes people whose data Kogan misused here as well.”

Secondly, Facebook will restrict developers’ data access even further to prevent other kinds of abuse. For example, Zuckerberg said, “we will remove developers’ access to your data if you haven’t used their app in 3 months. We will reduce the data you give an app when you sign in — to only your name, profile photo, and email address. We’ll require developers to not only get approval but also sign a contract in order to ask anyone for access to their posts or other private data. And we’ll have more changes to share in the next few days.”

Third, in the next month, Facebook will show users “a tool at the top of your News Feed with the apps you’ve used and an easy way to revoke those apps’ permissions to your data. We already have a tool to do this in your privacy settings, and now we will put this tool at the top of your News Feed to make sure everyone sees it.”

“While this specific issue involving Cambridge Analytica should no longer happen with new apps today, that doesn’t change what happened in the past. We will learn from this experience to secure our platform further and make our community safer for everyone going forward,” Zuckerberg wrote.