Stories in the media appear to be fuelling distrust of Facebook related to “harvesting” and “mining” of information published by users. It seems to be widely believed that this information, in all or some of its forms, has been used by a voter-profiling company to manipulate the political views of millions of people in North America and the United Kingdom. But the deductive process has gone straight from the simple claim that this peril has occurred to furious declarations that it is all true and mortally dangerous too. The parts where we get to examine what information was mined, how it was used, how it influenced anybody and what impact it had on behaviour are absent. The media have mined Facebook for years, using information and pictures that in another age would not have been so easily available, or not at all. The Canadian Press story here is an example of the expression of fear. This is no brief for Facebook. It’s done some stupid and disagreeable things. But it is correct that the information placed there by people was done freely. It is also true that the claim that this information was used in a way that manipulated populations to do things that they would not have done otherwise, is entirely unproven.
