The Communications Workers of America, the largest communications and media labor union in the United States, has joined the Freedom from Facebook movement. Although we all might like to spend a little less time on Facebook, the aims of the coalition are not so modest: They want to force the tech giant to break into smaller companies. As far as protecting users’ data, breaking up Facebook is a misguided crusade.
Public scrutiny is the best tool the public has in protecting user data, and Facebook is facing massive scrutiny today precisely because it is so large.
Facebook has been implicated in a number of scandals including the now infamous incident of providing data on millions of users to Cambridge Analytica through a Facebook survey app, which Cambridge Analytica used for undisclosed campaign purposes. Before that, Facebook also provided the Obama campaign with data on hundreds of thousands of users through accessing friends lists of those who had signed up for a campaign app. Data sharing, either through nefarious apps or through friends granting permission for a third party to access information, can clearly become a problem.
Facebook users know this, and both netizens and politicians are pushing Facebook to change. Facebook, recognizing that its prominence as the go-to social media site is in jeopardy if users do not trust the platform, is making efforts to both reform its practices and appeal to its users. Already the social media site has made its ads more transparent, let users see which apps have access to user information and updated its privacy settings among other measures.
If Facebook were instead a series of smaller companies, as Freedom from Facebook advocates, each would play a much smaller role in the lives of users. As a result, it would face less public scrutiny and be less accountable. Instead of prompting reform, its scandals would have slid under the radar.
Ironically, pushing a smaller tech company to focus more on privacy is much harder than pushing a giant — the more users a site has the more people care.
If users and organizations are serious about protecting privacy and ensuring that data is not misused, letting Facebook remain a giant – and thus always in the public eye — is key. Besides, if Facebook is no longer the one stop social media giant connecting most of the world, Chinese firms such as WeChat — along with their ties to the Chinese government — will be more than happy to step in.
