How does the Media still not understand Facebook?

First it was the New York Times, now it’s the Washington Post. They don’t seem to understand data and are angering readers for no reason.

Photo by Fabrizio Verrecchia on Unsplash

This morning, the Washington Post published a story claiming “Facebook shared user information with 52 hardware and software makers.” The Chicago Tribune ran it under the headline “Facebook acknowledges it shared user data with dozens of hardware and software companies”. The Hill and Engadget both ran similar stories.

This was a continuation of a misunderstanding originally made by the New York Times during the first week of June. Essentially, some New York Times reporters logged their BlackBerry into Facebook and realized that the phone was accessing their Facebook data. They subsequently found that Facebook had to have a partnership with the device maker for the phone to be able to access Facebook and wrote a story about how Facebook was sharing data with device makers.

The problem is, no one has shown that any of the device makers are actually accessing the data from the devices. All they’ve shown is that certain devices were able to access Facebook-like functionality without having to use a browser to log into Facebook. For example, you could log into your Facebook account on an iPhone and download your friends’ profile pictures. In order to do that, your phone has to get those pictures from Facebook. There is no evidence that the data actually went to the device maker, in this example Apple, rather than to the device.

This is getting conflated with the Cambridge Analytica case from earlier this year, when Americans were outraged to find that the various apps they were using to play games that requested access to their friends lists had been siphoning off their data for commercial purposes.

Nevertheless, readers don’t seem to realize that these are two separate issues. Just as the New York Times stories generated outrage among readers, readers of the Washington Post story also piled on the anti-Facebook train with comments like:

Facebook is evil. (By ‘caseyjonesd’, 4 likes)

This just shows why our Country is in the state it’s in. People complain about Facebook giving their information to out side sources, yet keep participating in it. (By ‘etichman’, 1 likes)

How many times has this happened? I’ve lost count. (By ‘santacruzjeff’, 2 likes)

The Washington Post story doesn’t seem to have generated as much public backlash as the original New York Times story. Still, there seems to be an issue where the public seems to be treating data like dark magic. There is a lot to be angry with Facebook about, but unless someone finds that the data is getting moved to the device makers’ servers, simply being able to access Facebook functionality directly from a device isn’t one of those.