The network effect is Facebook’s biggest selling point, and the root of many of its problems.
Before many people join a network, it may not be so useful. But the more people join, the more useful it becomes. That’s the network effect. Facebook is a step beyond that — it’s the network effect on steroids.
This is what makes Facebook so great: It knows everything about you! That’s also what makes Facebook so awful: It knows everything about you. And while its 2.13 billion monthly users don’t pay any money to use the core service, Facebook makes plenty of money — millions daily — by selling access to users’ data to advertisers. And everyone on the site agreed to this when they signed up.
What happened with Cambridge Analytica illustrates how our personal boundaries for using that data in the real world are being tested. Facebook allows academic researchers more access to user data than commercial companies and app developers. So a researcher built a personality quiz app under those guidelines, and people used the app — and in doing so, allowed it to harvest anonymized data from their Facebook profiles.
But they also gave the app access to data from their friends, who did not directly consent to the terms of the app. So while only 270,000 users took the quiz, by Facebook’s latest estimate, the app was able to harvest data of at least 87 million users. Here’s the kicker: This was all aboveboard. The data collection didn’t violate any rules.
But what wasn’t allowed was selling that data — originally collected for research purposes — to Cambridge Analytica, which used it for business purposes.
This has a lot of people frustrated with Facebook. But at the end of the day, it doesn’t matter so much to Facebook’s bottom line whether you like their website, only that you’re using it. Because remember, you’re not just a customer; you’re also the product. And Facebook knows that as long as your 2 billion friends are online, you’re probably not going anywhere.
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