Cambridge Analytica, Facebook and Chatbots — Sign of an End or a Start?
*This is an opinion piece and is the view of the author and not necessarily the view expressed by ChatbotsMagazine
Cambridge Analytica, a political data firm hired by President Trump’s 2016 election campaign, gained access to private information on more than 50 million Facebook users. The firm offered tools that could identify the personalities of American voters and influence their behavior. Recent investigation brings more revelation that this scam might have affected Brexit decision as well as election in India.
A British TV news report brought this in the media. Every eye has turned to Facebook since. Although Facebook revoked the user data access from Cambridge Analytica already but meantime the data privacy for 50 million users were compromised. It was huge shock to the Facebook users. This incident has open up a lot of open questions.
Facebook, being the biggest social media platform across the globe, holds lots of privileges — having the biggest user base is just one of them. Facebook has lost almost $50 billion in the last week over the scam. Mark Zuckerberg has apologized to UK people over newspaper ad. He has marked his apology several times stating better & improvised Facebook security is already in place to stop such massacre in future.
The damage is so deep that even it’s competitor like WhatsApp co-founder Brian Acton has introduced an open war in Twitter handle: #deletefacebook. Report says that he is working on to create a social media platform backed by a non-profit organization to counter the growing popularity of Facebook and create a new trend. Interestingly Elon Musk has joined the trend too. He has turned down his Tesla Facebook Page containing 2.5 million users. After some time, he also deleted the other Facebook page for SpaceX also.
To control the damage, Facebook has now taking multiple initiatives. One of them has cast its direct impact on Messenger Chatbot platform. Currently Facebook is changing Messenger policies and they have stopped accepting any chatbot for next 2 weeks. This is a BIG news for Chatbot developers and agencies as this will hamper the planned upcoming business launch.
Does this mean that the golden period of Facebook is over? After getting blamed for spreading Fake News around, this is the second time Mark has been convicted with another scam. In their latest release, Messenger team has released documentation on creating chatbot with more ease. Bot communities predicted that Facebook might be thinking of get rid of 3rd party chatbot developers eventually and make the most profit out of it by letting the users build chatbot directly.
Since the chatbot platforms have grown significantly in number, most of the renowned chatbots are not only relying on one platform like Facebook but publishing their bots in several other social media platforms like Twitter, Slack, Skype, Kik, Telegram, Google Assistant, Amazon Alexa, Cisco Spark, Viber, Twilio, Tropo, LINE, Microsoft Cortana etc. The list is growing almost everyday. This recent Messenger announcement will surely accelerate a significant migration of chatbots to different platforms.
Surely it would be an interesting trend to follow how the Cambridge Analytica scam will affect Facebook over time (may be with more shocking revelation) as it brought momentum in the chatbot evolution since 2016. This might create new valid concerns over user data security (like GDPR in Europe) related to chatbot and pave a new way for chatbot business line evolution too.
