Facebook Offering New Privacy Controls a Little Too Late

Let's bring in Hotspot Shield cybersecurity analyst Robert Siciliano. Get you to weigh in here, Robert. It's good to see you, sir. Thanks so much for joining us.

Good morning, Maria.

What's your take on this? This is breaking right now. Facebook is introducing new features for users to download and delete data.

Yeah, this is, you know, reminiscent of anyone who's committed a crime and they apologize after, you know, wishing that, you know, didn't happen that way. And, you know, it's a little late for that. You know, the cat's out of the bag, the horse is out of out of the barn. And, um, you know, while these new privacy controls may, uh, tamper things down a little bit, um, I think it's a little too late.

Yeah, I think one of the biggest questions we're having, Robert, is you talk about it's a little too late. I mean, we saw that after the, uh, election in 2016, they still— they kind of doubled down saying, hey, this isn't our fault. They weren't the ones to blame. They weren't the ones doing, uh, anything wrong. They were victims themselves. Now, how do you— how do you reconcile what's going on with Facebook, with Google? I think Google Google is another canary in the coal mine. We're talking about all these FAANG stocks being batted down, and I think Google is actually the next pillar to fall because I feel like they have more sensitive information from business to personal to maps to everything you name it. So, so where do we go from here? And do you think Google is the next, the next pillar to fall?

Well, there's, there's no question about it. Google, Facebook, Snapchat, Instagram, all of these sites are gathering a tremendous amount of information about us. And when you think about it, phone companies I mean, think about phone companies, right? They've had a lot of information on us for years. I mean, they have access to our phone calls, access to our devices, right? Uh, you think credit card companies. I mean, they know everything that you're purchasing every single day. And think about the amount of data they have on you. And right now, companies like Google and Facebook and others aren't nearly regulated the way credit card companies are, financial institutions are, the way, uh, phone companies are. And I think that regulation is what's on the horizon for all these companies. I think that they have lacked self-regulation for all these years. They've gotten away with so much. And this right here, this is effectively the wake-up call. And you're going to see politicians worldwide tampering down.

Well, you got to— you got to thank President Trump for that, because nobody cared what Facebook was doing until, oh, whoops, somebody used it to actually help the Trump campaign. And now all of a sudden, Democrats who protected Facebook for years are up in arms. Robert Siciliano, was this the biggest open secret in Silicon Valley? That this was what— how Facebook ran its business?

You know, I think that this hasn't really been a secret at all. I think that the public has known about this.

I think most reporters with Maria, they know it wasn't a secret because we've been sitting on this very program talking about it for years.

Yeah, years.

And we knew that a bigger regulatory bite was coming, by the way. We all said this. Dagan and I have been talking about this for a long time. They had Facebook Live allowing people to commit suicide and kill themselves on TV, and their reaction was, "Oh, well, we rolled it out too quickly." Yeah, and more than that, they're more powerful than they ever have been.

They have—

I mean, Google says it anonymizes our search items after 2 years. Why? Why not anonymize it immediately? Why must you sit on our search— what we are searching for for 2 years? It's incredible.

Yeah, they— Google at this point, you know, they know that the end is near. Facebook knows they can't continue this behavior. Behavior. They're, they're rolling out all these features right now just to kind of calm everybody down, but I don't think that's going to matter. I think the regulation is going to come hard, it's going to come fast, and it's going to cost them and their investors a lot of money.

I think that there's still a lot to be discovered about what Facebook was doing, and the core of their business to me is so insidious because again, they were constantly asking you for more and more information, more and more information, because they wanted to improve the social experience, let your friends know what you like. We need to know exactly where you went to elementary school so your life can be better by us improving our features. And it's just a big lie. They were trying to collect more and more data on you so then they could essentially, they could slice and dice it and sell it and make their advertising that much more attractive to advertisers. But another thing— there are a couple other things. How much information is out there from app developers that was gathered between 2007 and 2015 when they said they put an end to the practice of basically collecting vast amounts of data from anybody and everybody? It's sitting out there on servers, number one, and I think that we're just beginning to scratch the surface on how Facebook really drives news. Yeah, there are no independent news organizations except for like the Wall Street Journal and very few newspapers, because what happens is these news organizations, these magazines, they essentially write articles based on what Google and Facebook tell them will get the most eyeballs. And can we just get some numbers in here? About 140 million Americans get news from Facebook. I'm quoting from an editorial, Robert Siciliano. Wow. Well, Fox News— well, let's not talk about Fox News's viewership, but it's much lower than 140 million people. And they're not showing every part of the political spectrum. They're skewed to the left. I mean, my hope is that now maybe some of these readers will start to question, you know, what Facebook is feeding them. Well, here's what— and Robert, you can respond to this— but here's what always got me so upset. When people would find out that basically our intelligence agencies were trying to use metadata to track terrorists and prevent terror attacks, you would get open arms, asymmetric rage, outrage from people in this country. But yet they were never upset about Facebook, about them handing over the most sensitive personal information to Facebook for a private company to make money off of it. Right.

Yeah, the general public are somewhat naive to this, and I think that's only because they don't recognize that while social is free, that they in fact, the consumer, the user, they are the product of what's being sold. And I don't think that they're thinking that through. And as a result, they're all shocked by this.

Or is this information coming in and out so quickly? Can you regulate Facebook?

I'm sure at some level they can be. Yeah, they have to be.

The best thing Facebook can do, along with these other social media giants, is do a self-regulatory agency where they hold themselves accountable if they don't want the government to get involved. But one of the things is they had discriminatory advertising going on relentlessly where people could go on and just say, we don't want to advertise to people of color. Yeah, it's ridiculous.

Let's just remember what happens when the pendulum swung so far on the banks. Yeah. When, you know, they overregulated the banks. They became bigger. So I just throw that out there to say, can you know, has the horse left the station at this point, right? Robert, thank you very much. Robert Siciliano, thank you, Maria.