Nick Clegg is doing the same useful job for Mark Zuckerberg as he did for David Cameron’s Tories.
In what many saw as a surprise move, Meta has promoted former UK Deputy Prime Minister Nick Clegg to its President of Global Affairs. According to Mark Zuckerberg, Meta’s founder and CEO, Clegg is now “a senior leader at the level of myself…who can lead and represent us for all of our policy issues globally”.
What should we make of this? Is it too optimistic to think that Meta’s culture of personal data mining and manipulation might finally be coming to an end?
Meta, formerly known as Facebook, has long been criticised for its data privacy and policy practises. As far back as 2007, only three years after its founding, Zuckerberg had to apologise for informing users’ friends of their purchases. In 2011, the company agreed with the US Federal Trade Commission (FTC) that it would undergo independent audits every other year in the face of charges that it was sharing people’s private information with third party apps.
The trouble with Facebook and data privacy has only continued, however. This ranged from a bug that revealed private information in 2013, to admitting it was secretly doing mood manipulation experiments on users in 2014, to collecting information about private users through third party sites in 2018.
Most notoriously, this was also the year that Facebook acknowledged it knew about massive data harvesting in the Cambridge Analytica scandal. The FTC went on to fine the company a record-breaking US$5bn (£3.7bn) over the scandal. The commission declared that:
