Can I stop now? I'm tired - all that emotion and indignation is draining. Especially as I don't actually, erm, feel much of it. In fact, my thoughts about the whole Facebook-Cambridge-Analytica-data-mining scandal are, in a nutshell, something along the lines of "hmmmm, yes", rather than the hysterical meltdown into a puddle of fury that seems to be expected. I fully accept that CA has behaved unpleasantly. I'm not happy with the suggestion that there was meddling in elections with data it wasn't meant to have, nor with its CEO Alexander Nix boasting of using fake news and sex scandals to sway voters - as an undercover report last week revealed he'd done.
And yes, we clearly need to work out who owns user data on (free) social media accounts, who gets the right to mine that data, and what that data should cost. None the less, I've found myself utterly mystified by the extreme levels of shock-horror I've seen over the past week.
In the first place, there's a thing called choice. We opt to use Facebook because it is a social media platform that offers us untold benefits - for free. It's fun in all sorts of ways, as well as being a handy archive of our lives in an age when most people are either too lazy or busy to keep diaries. For budding entrepreneurs and small business owners who use it as a marketing platform, it's been an absolute boon (a number of them have already come out saying they won't be joining the #deletefacebook campaign any time soon).
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But back to that business of it being "free". It seems that we've forgotten that nothing in life is actually, in fact, free. We plaster our baby pics and preferences all over Facebook, and joyously slurp up those of our "friends". It's hardly a surprise that Facebook wants something in return. And if that something is the fascinating, multifaceted sets of information gleanable from the stuff we (in bulk) post, then it's hardly so shocking if that stuff gets used in ways we might not have foreseen. And for those who have got themselves all worked up by this, remember: you don't have to be on Facebook at all.
In truth, I can't help but think that the real problem here is less to do with the tech industry's seemingly callous regard for privacy, and more to do with the psychology (read: outsize egos) of some of its players. Just look around: these guys - certainly the ones involved in scandals like this - are brainy, arrogant men many of whom, armed with physics degrees, see themselves as the new masters of the universe.
My experience recently encountering some of them on dating apps confirms this. Just the words "works at Google" on a Tinder profile, for instance, signals that your date - short, unappealing, uncharming though he may be - will assume he's God's gift to women. No wonder that, with their six- or seven-figure salaries, free in-house massage therapists, Pilates classes and sushi bars on tap, these men really do begin to think they're idols, not the slightly smelly, mannerless geeks many of them actually are.
So I'm just about OK with Facebook taking my data and doing interesting things with it, and I still believe that the biggest and best tech firms have good things to offer the world.
But as my experience suggests, the industry's main problem is not data sets, it's the fanning of outsized egos.
Telegraph, London