In Trouble 

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Once upon a time, Facebook, Google, and Amazon were on top of the world. In 2005, the New York Times reported that Jim Breyer, a venture capitalist who had invested $13 million in Facebook, a startup at the time, said it was “a business that has seen tremendous underlying, organic growth and the team itself is intellectually honest and breathtakingly brilliant in terms of understanding the college student experience.” The early 2000s were just as important for Google as it overtook Yahoo as the primary internet search engine. In fact, Yahoo had even attempted to purchase Google for $3 billion but was rejected as the startup felt it was worth at least $5 billion. Amazon was also soaring at this time. Jeff Bezos became Time Magazine’s Person of the Year in 1999 and was deemed “the king of ecommerce.” Every few months, the company continued to launch new departments or features, from “1-Click” to Amazon Prime to acquiring Whole Foods.

 

Yet, these companies have made choices in a clinically detached fashion to continue rapidly expanding. In order to improve Alexa’s response to customers, Amazon has employed workers around the world to listen to approximately 1,000 audio clips in shifts that could last up to nine hours. As the media publishes articles that expose such practices, the reputations of these companies have taken hits.

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Facebook Under Fire  

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As a leading social media content distributor, Facebook collects data by quantifying engagement on the site (comments, likes, and sharing). As a result, users’ feeds (called News Feed) are somewhat like a bubble – personalized to the point where one does not know what others are seeing. According to Facebook for Media, the “News Feed is a personalized, ever-changing collection of photos, videos, links, and updates from…friends, businesses and news sources…connected to on Facebook.” This aspect is what made the company so popular in the first place.

 

In 2014, a decade after it was founded in Mark Zuckerberg’s dorm at Harvard, Facebook had become one of the most powerful information warehouses. It bought any startup that was challenging its position. In 2012, Facebook purchased Instagram for approximately $1 billion. Then, in early 2014, Facebook bought WhatsApp, which allows people to send messages and call others around the world using the Internet, for roughly $19 billion. Facebook was making its users feel uneasy with its shift to full-blown capitalism, and people started to utilize a combination of other social apps to supplant the social network’s influence, such as Snapchat, Twitter, and Pinterest. All of these sites were already threatening Facebook’s status. Journalists began to write that “we can still have social networks without the social network.”  And then online privacy brought the company down.

 

In November 2018, the New York Times published a detailed report that described how Facebook’s leaders (Mark Zuckerberg, Sheryl Sandberg, and Joel Kaplan) managed the never-ending crisis that started with engineers at the company finding Russia-linked activity on its site. When the news was leaked that Cambridge Analytica, a British political data firm connected with President Trump, had unregulated access to more than 50 million Facebook users, Facebook first tried to hide the problem. Both Zuckerberg and Sandberg, from 2014 to 2017, had ignored evidence that Facebook was susceptible to potentially propagating fake news, inspiring extremist causes, and distorting elections in order to pursue other projects. Facebook’s strategy to protect itself from the angry public –Zuckerberg going on a national “listening tour” and Sandberg building relationships to fight Facebook’s critics – also faced backlash from the public. In addition, the company pursued the strategy of employing a Republican opposition-research firm to shame protestors by connecting them to George Soros and also hired a Jewish civil rights group to highlight some of the censures as anti-Semitic. Kaplan recommended holding back all information from the Russian-linked activity, so Republicans did not feel singled out. Even Senator Chuck Schumer (D-NY), whose younger daughter works for Facebook, urged the top Democrat on the Senate Intelligence Committee, Senator Mark Warner (D-VA) to go easy on the company.

 

In wake of the series of scandals, multiple Facebook executives have the company. The list includes Elliot Schrage (head of communications and public policy), Alex Stamos (chief security officer), Chris Cox (chief product officer), and Jan Koum (co-founder of WhatsApp). While Facebook has said that no one has left on bad terms, it is unexpected behavior from a company that has normally kept its executives for a long period of time.

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The Fall of Google+ 

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“Don’t be evil” was Google’s motto from 2000 until about 2015, even having a prime position in its old corporate code of conduct. While this slogan was adjusted to “do the right thing” when the parent company, Alphabet, was formed, it was apparently so deeply ingrained in the culture that it served as a Wi-Fi password on the employee shuttles. The former motto had received criticism for being vague and irrelevant to a company that has become bigger and bigger. Coincidentally, as the company reorganized, it has also been reproached for mishandling privacy concerns.

 

Google has around 251 products and services that are used by individuals, businesses, and governments around the world. One of these products was Google Plus (also known as Google+ or G+), which was created in 2011 to compete with other social networks such as Facebook and Twitter. In October 2018, Google reported that there was a bug in the network that exposed the information of roughly 500,000 users. While the problem itself was apparently “relatively small in scope,” the issue was that Google covered this news up for seven months. This was discovered by the Wall Street Journal when it obtained memos discussing the problem.

 

Several regulators are looking into this mismanagement, both in the US and the EU. Due to the VP behind Google+, Vic Gundotra, leaving the company in 2014, and the failure of the product as a whole, Google left the social network vulnerable to viruses. Google+ was killed on April 2, 2019.

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Amazon 

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Amazon is no stranger to user privacy violations either. While voice assistants, such as Siri, Google Assistant, and Alexa are becoming popular, they are not considered trustworthy. In a PricewaterhouseCoopers survey, 38 percent of respondents did not want to purchase a smart device because they felt that they “did not want something listening in…all the time.”

 

Voice assistants typically only record once they hear a command from the user. These recordings are stored in the app of the device along with account information. Yet, there have been stories of data mismanagement. An Amazon Echo device sent a couple’s conversation to an employee in the husband’s company in November 2018. It seemed that Alexa picked up words that sounded like commands and thought the recording should be sent to a name it heard. In December 2018, Amazon put 1,700 voice recordings in the wrong account.

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Now What? 

 

Since Cambridge Analytica, #DeleteFacebook, and Zuckerberg’s testimony to Congress, Facebook is attempting to clean up its image. Zuckerberg has announced a renovation of Facebook’s products that focus on the user’s privacy. There will be a shift toward private group chats that will be encrypted and removable. The company has been working on a “clear history” tool that will allow users to delete data Facebook collects about them from third-party sites. It is planned to be released later this year.

 

Google has also taken action to become more “privacy first.” Chrome has added the search engine DuckDuckGo to its selection of Google, Yahoo, and Bing. DuckDuckGo protects users from software that tracks ads. It does not keep search history and adds encryption to search queries.

 

Apple, along with Microsoft, has been on the side of the user. In fact, CEO Tim Cook has said that “[Apple] always viewed privacy as a human right. And in this country, we view it that it's ingrained in the Constitution.” It has claimed to store less user data than other tech companies and keeps it on user devices. In Apple’s latest iPhone ad, it takes a swipe at Facebook and Google, stating “if privacy matters in your life, it should matter to the phone your life is on.”

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