Never violate customer trust

The current debacle with Facebook has been brewing for a while now, and it is very sad. For me it started last year, when I got tired of constant fake news and privacy concerns. Since then I’ve had next to zero activity on the platform. It’s sad as it is a great way to remain connected to friends and family. But at what cost?

The most successful social platform and company ever, it didn’t embrace customer trust and privacy and now it must work on (re)building customer trust.

Letting personal identifiable data to get out into the wild, even worst, personal data of friends of friends, not only breaks customer trust, but it’s also dangerous. Clearly customer was not the top priority, but instead the evolution and monetization of the platform was. A lesson that was learned the hard way. Hindsight is 20/20.

———————————————————-

Side note: I hope all this debacle serves as a lesson to humanity. And about the importance of understanding the “fine print” when people accepts terms and conditions in general. From Understanding the Facebook-Cambridge Analytica Story: QuickTake (Washington Post):

Kogan collected data not just on those users but on their Facebook friends, if their privacy settings allowed it — a universe of people initially estimated to be 50 million strong, then upped to 87 million. The app, in its terms of service, disclosed that it would collect data on users and their friends.

In short, asking for permission is not sufficient. One must go beyond this and understand and anticipate all the scenarios and impacts to the customer. I do remember back in 2010 when using the Graph API which allowed me to see my friends and the rest of the graph. Again, hindsight is 20/20.

———————————————————-

Strong customer privacy is achievable. There are levels of privacy, but the level that must never be broken is the one that breaks customer trust. Having the right culture at all levels is key to ensure that customer trust is never violated. “Customer trust” must be embodied and lived, and continuous education on the matter provided to all employees, regardless of level, or the result is the debacle we are seeing with Facebook. When I joined Amazon one of the things that I found fascinating was the customer focus. At Amazon this is called Customer Obsession (start with the customer and work backwards) and it’s the first of its leadership principles. This principle is repeated and repeated, and communicated all the time. It’s part of the hiring process, and part of the performance evaluation process. It’s communicated on your first day at work and throughout the year. Never ever violate customer trust. Once it is violated, it is very hard to regain (or deserved). This impacts how you handle the customer, how you design software, how you collect, store, transmit and deal with customer data, even things like GPS position granularity. Customer trust is sacred.

It takes the above culture and philosophy at all levels to ensure that when the company grows to the size of a Facebook, Google or Amazon, that customer trust is respected, maintained by default and not broken.

Observations re: Facebook Data:

Downloading my data from Facebook was eye-opening. I knew a lot was being collected, but it’s still eye opening.
There is a lot of detail. As a software technologist myself, it made me think and question if maintaining such level of detail, everything forever, is really necessary versus better ways perhaps only maintaining metadata that is sufficient to meet goals (and throw away the detail after some period).
Seeing all the detailed personal data, all centralized, does make Facebook (and others similar) a black hacker’s paradise or even government paradise — one place shopping for all personal information for 2 billion people. Dangerous stuff!
Privacy settings are too hard to manage. Simplify this via consolidation and educational UI workflows in real-time: show and walk the user through what and why and when.
Keep customer first, and work backwards from there. Then monetize.
Bring outside unbiased people to help rectify the culture.
Educate all employees at all levels, continuously.

I’ll re-engage the Facebook platform as it is the best way to remain connected to my friends and family who’re far away, but I’ll with a new sense of awareness…

It’s important to say that this issue with personal data and privacy is not particular to Facebook and that all companies today must revisit their customer commitments, privacy policies and priorities.

-ceo