Greg's Corner

Facebook has more controversies than it can handle

Artist’s rendering of the Facebook board room

I’m going to let you have a little peek behind the curtain here at Greg’s Corner. As the official blogger for Geebo.com, I don’t like to post about the same subject twice in the same week. For example, earlier this week, I posted about how some in tech journalism are wondering if Mark Zuckerberg should step down as Facebook CEO in the wake of the Cambridge Analytica scandal. So, I had no real intentions of posting about Facebook again this week. That was until I checked my usual sources for news and the attention on Facebook was so intense that I had no choice but to blog about Facebook once again this week. The problem is that it’s not just one story about Facebook that is grabbing headlines today, but an overabundance of headlines in regard to Facebook today.

For example…

The Australian government is launching an investigation into Facebook as it’s possible that the data of 300,000 Australian Facebook users may have been compromised. This is similar to a claim made my the European Union that says that 2.7 million citizens of the EU may have had their information compromised as well. While we’re still on the world stage, Indonesia is launching its own investigation to see if Facebook breached that country’s privacy laws.

Speaking of privacy issues, Facebook recently admitted that it scans users private messages. Supposedly, they do it to block content that doesn’t fit their ‘community standards’ but Facebook has always been intentionally vague about what those standards exactly entail. However, there is one person on Facebook whose private messages are completely safe. Of course that’s Mark Zuckerberg. Some of his private messages to other Facebook employees have been removed from Facebook. Facebook claims they did this in the wake of the Sony hacking scandal of a few years ago. Still, it seems a little bit more than hypocritical on Facebook’s part. However, the most egregious possible invasion of privacy Facebook was looking to commit was that of users’ medical records. According to CNBC, Facebook was allegedly asking several prominent hospitals for anonymous data about their patients, such as illnesses and prescription info, for a proposed research project. That doesn’t sound ominous in the least. Wisely, Facebook has decided to stop pursuing that avenue of research for now.

I was about to say that Facebook is on the verge of becoming some kine of Orwellian surveyor, but let’s face it, they already are. The fictional Big Brother from Orwell’s 1984 would be jealous of the amount of surveillance Facebook conducts on its 2 billion users.