Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg spent five hours testifying before the United States Senate on Tuesday last week following the highly publicised Cambridge Analytica data infractions which included the use and abuse of personal data to run political campaigns targeted at Facebook users. The next day, he spent more time with members of the House of Representatives. Among the topics Zuckerberg’s testimony covered included how President Trump-linked data mining firm Cambridge Analytica obtained data of 87 million users and how Russia used Facebook to meddle in American presidential election of 2016.
Interestingly, Zuckerberg immediately took responsibility and apologized. “We didn’t take a broad enough view of our responsibility, and that was a big mistake,” he said in a statement. “It was my mistake, and I’m sorry. I started Facebook, I run it, and I’m responsible for what happens here.” One thing that we saw from the congressional hearing was the fact that Facebook is powerful. The stock-market, one way to gauge the company’s power, responded favourably to the face-off the 33-year old CEO had with the Senate. On the first day of the testimony alone, Zuckerberg’s net worth increased by $3 billion. That is about one million dollars a minute. This was because his performance and the 10-hour congressional grilling showed that the lawmakers were not willing to implement any stringent regulations against the tech giant which made $16 billion in profit last year – even after the platform was weaponized by Russia to disrupt American elections.
The lawmakers’ reluctance to get Facebook to radically rethink its business model was not unconnected with the anti-regulatory climate in Washington. But that may be changing. “In the past, many of my colleagues on both sides of the aisle have been willing to defer to tech companies’ efforts to regulate themselves,” warned John Thune, the Republican senator from South Dakota. “But this may be changing.” Most instructive at the hearing however, was how the lawmakers continued to ask if Zuckerberg could be trusted to self-regulate as if they were asking for his permission. Even the reasonable suggestion by Sen. Amy Klobuchar that Facebook users should be informed within 72 hours of a data breach was met with Zuckerberg’s “my team will follow up with you on this.”
What does this mean for Nigeria? It means that we can’t rely on foreign countries to protect our personal data. We must protect ourselves; and the fact that even our president’s email was hacked (when he was running for president) to access medical information makes this direction more compelling. And how to do this is not be as farfetched as we may think. We can simply borrow a leaf from the European Union which is implementing a new data protection regulation on 25 May this year. The new law, General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) was passed in April 2016 (but comes into force next month) to replace the Data Protection Directive which didn’t have as much legal teeth.
GDPR will stand as a single standard and replace all the local data protection laws in the member states. The regulation is recognized to be very robust. For example, it affects even companies outside the EU provided they serve EU member states. Nigeria is in search of an overarching data protection regulation. We can however, count at least six laws that address data protection – starting with Section 37 of the constitution which states: “The privacy of citizens, their homes, correspondence, telephone conversations and telegraphic communications is hereby guaranteed and protected.” Other laws that address personal data are National Information Technology Development Agency (NITDA) Act 2007; Consumer Code of Practice Regulations 2007; The Nigerian Communications Commission RTS (Registration of Telephone Subscribers) Regulation 2011 and the Cybercrimes Act 2015.
All these regulations exist to be used. We therefore need more enforcement than more laws. And we have to do it ourselves and not wait for others to do it for us.
