The hysteria around Cambridge Analytica, Facebook and private user data is reaching its firs climax, and one might believe that we all had agreed to hand over our first borns to Mark Zuckerberg.

But let;’s start from the beginning: Cambridge Analytica, a political consulting firm with an admittedly doubtful reputation, has – as have done tens of thousands of other companies – accessed user data through programing interfaces or other tools provided by Facebook and used it for campaigns. Everyone who has advertised on Facebook knows that you can target audiences according to age, gender, interests, or region and many other criteria. Whether that’s used for ad campaigns or political campaigns doesn’t really matter.

But Cambridge Analytica took one further step and pulled additional information from the users, such as the users’ friends, and thus came from a few tens of thousands of records to reportedly 50 million user records. And those have been used for helping Donald Trump getting elected as US president.

Not just the use of Facebook itself for the electoral campaign, but pulling the additional data by Cambridge Analytica and the failure of deleting the data after being told so by Facebook has violated Facebook’s terms of use. That’s why Cambridge Analytica’s account was deactivated by Facebook.

The surprise and the public outcry by the fact that Facebook is using user data for campaigns, seems pretty much hypcritical and is a decoy for creating a culprit.

A service like Facebook that is free to use for users does not hide the fact that user data and the data created by users will be used for commercial purposes. That’s neither new, nor unusual, nor a secret. It’s even mentioned in Facebook’s terms of use which every user before creating an account has to agree to.

The mantra by now known everyone of “if you don’t pay for the product, you are the product” precisely describes it. Not that we are forced to use Facebook (or any other one of our preferred social media platforms) and that they don’t deliver any value for us. In fact, the opposite is true. We benefit more than we want to admit and probably most of us realize. If you don’t believe that, just make the experiment of logging of from them for a week and tell us afterwards what you missed.

The outrage of learning about the fact that Facebook is using user data to make money is pure hypocrisy. Everyone knew it and should have known it.. The outrage rather serves its own purpose for the hypocrites who got now a welcome opportunity to frame Facebook as culprit  for their own failure: that America could elect somebody like Trump as president, or that the right-wing AfD could become such a strong force in Germany, or that Austria almost elected a a right-wing president and got somebody like Sebastian Kurz as chancellor opening the doors for the right-wing FPÖ into the government.

It’s easier to do Facebook-bashing than taking the blame ourselves. Instead of checking the validity of posts we are liking and sharing them, and then blame Facebook for giving us fake news. Instead of creating conditions to enable startups to create such platforms, we prevent them from doing so by regulations such as the General Data Protection Regulation.

But doing something constructively is too much effort. We are rather celebrating data privacy activist such as Max Schrems from Austria, who has dragged Facebook to court than contributing positive to the world.

„American students create Facebook, European students sue Facebook.“

That way we are not going to win. And our hypocrisy is unbelievable. The only thing that can help us is to start doing and creating such things ourselves, and not have the others do it and then be the ones who loudly complain.

This article has also been published in German.