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Mark Zuckerberg recently remarked that it might take years for Facebook to resolve the recent controversial use of user data involving Cambridge Analytica.
It may sound like a lame excuse, but he’s likely right. Facebook’s problem is structural because it isn’t just about privacy. It really is about Facebook’s stunning information power. There is no easy fix — not even with thousands of smart coders — without fundamentally altering Facebook’s business.
Some argue we only need to apply antitrust law to rein in Facebook’s grip on our digital social interactions. But antitrust laws look at market share, price fixing, and anticompetitive behavior; they don’t focus much on the structure of information power.
Facebook’s danger isn’t its size or that it captures monopoly rents. Facebook’s danger is its structure that makes not just itself, but us all vulnerable to flawed decision-making. Facebook isn’t just an online platform. It also is the central communication conduit, quite literally seeing everything that’s happening on it. And using all the data it gathers, it’s choosing what each of us gets to see. That makes it the dominating platform, eavesdropper, and filter fused together into one extremely powerful structure.
So split up Facebook, others argue, like Standard Oil or AT&T in decades past. But that’s just dealing with symptoms. We need something that addresses the problem’s root cause.
We believe the solution is a progressive data-sharing mandate. It would require Facebook (and any similarly structured powerful player, like Google and Amazon to share part of its data with other market participants, including competitors and small startups. The larger Facebook’s market share, the bigger the slice of its data it would have to share.
Of course, the data would have to be anonymized and recipients obliged to use the data responsibly to ensure that addressing the threat of information monopolies don’t exacerbate the privacy problem. And data would have to be chosen at random, so that neither side could easily game the system.
This isn’t expropriating Facebook; it still could use the data it collects for its own purposes. But by providing others with data, others could use the data to learn from and offer alternative filters for the Facebook platform. In fact, if we get the details right, we’d have a healthy diversity of filtering tools replacing the current Facebook monoculture.
Facebook could still operate the platform. It would probably still make a lot of money. But we’d get better filtering according to our preferences. Instead of giving us more of the same, new filters might surprise us, or find pockets of overlooked news and information that Facebook currently overlooks. Facebook would no longer be the only voice suggesting to us what to look at, no longer be a single point of vulnerability to our public discourse.
To require companies to share data with others isn’t completely new. In the past, the Justice Department has made Google share with third parties the travel data it had bought. In some European nations, insurers have to share claims data with other insurers to improve risk calculations, and starting in May this year, Europe’s new data privacy law mandates that consumers can request companies to share digitally their personal data with competitors and other third parties. Mark Zuckerberg recently announced Facebook would offer such “data portability”, as it is called, to users outside of Europe as well.
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This isn’t the comprehensive data-sharing that is needed, because it still requires millions of users to take actions to make it work. If Google’s experience with European data regulations is any guidance, only a couple of hundred thousand individuals may request it every month. But it is an important step in the right direction. And it shows that the general idea of sharing data to limit information power is gaining traction.
Through the progressive data-sharing mandate, we take the central idea of markets and democracy — decentralized power — and bring it back into how we communicate online and thus ensure resilience for our society.
Viktor Mayer-Schönberger and Thomas Ramge are the authors of the recently published book “Reinventing Capitalism in the Age of Big Data.”