Enough With the Facebook Bashing

European Straits #62

Dear all,

Last week was dominated by Facebook’s latest series of problems. A worldwide scandal has erupted following the revelation that Cambridge Analytica, a firm that worked for the Trump campaign in 2016, has illegally diverted data about millions of Facebook users’ social graphs.

I happen to know the technological context quite well. Back in 2010-2012, I was the CEO of a Paris-based tech startup whose core business was to exploit information about people’s social graphs. Following the example of the 2008 Obama presidential campaign, my cofounders and I were seeking to orchestrate value-creating relationships between individuals who didn’t know each other but had a lot in common—whether it was to help elect a candidate, find a new job or purchase a new product.

Now, I have to say, we didn’t collect too much data. Like many startups, mine never really took off. But I remember that third-party developers like us were authorized to collect information about people’s social graph through…