Facebook Under Fire: Its failure to protect users' private data has spurred calls for federal regulation of social media companies.

• Author: Smith, Patricia
• Position: Cover story

Christopher Deason stumbled upon the psychological questionnaire on June 9, 2014. He was taking a lot of online surveys back then, and nothing about this one struck him as unusual. So at 6:37 that evening, Deason completed the first step of the survey: He granted access to his Facebook account.

Less than a second later, a Facebook app had harvested not only Deason's profile data, but also data from the profiles of 205 of his Facebook friends. Their names, birth dates, location data, and lists of every Facebook page they had ever liked were downloaded.

The information was added to a huge database being compiled for a political data firm called Cambridge Analytica that later worked for Donald Trump's 2016 presidential campaign. None of the people whose data was collected knew it had happened.

"I don't think I would have gone forward with it if I had," says Deason, 27.

As many as 87 million Facebook users may have had their personal information used without their knowledge by Cambridge Analytica. The revelations have prompted Facebook's worst crisis since its founding in 2004. Users are angry, lawmakers are calling for action, and the social media company, which has more than 2 billion users worldwide, has been scrambling to respond.

Facebook's CEO, Mark Zuckerberg, who created the social network while he was a student at Harvard University, spent two days last month testifying before Congress in an attempt to appease critics and accept responsibility.

"We have made a lot of mistakes in running the company," Zuckerberg, 33, told senators. "I think it's pretty much impossible, I believe, to start a company in your dorm room and then grow it to be at the scale that we're at now without making some mistakes."

But many lawmakers expressed skepticism about Facebook's ability to police itself, and some have introduced bills designed to protect user privacy and regulate social media companies. Senator Lindsey Graham, Republican of South Carolina, called Facebook a "virtual monopoly" because there's no equivalent service the public can turn to if it's fed up with Facebook. Graham said that pointed to the need for federal regulation.

"There has to be a law," agreed Senator Richard Blumenthal, Democrat of Connecticut. "Unless there's a law, their business model is going to continue to maximize profit over privacy."

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