Fast Company

On April 30, 1993, CERN—the European Organization for Nuclear Research—announced that it was putting a piece of software developed by one of its researchers, Tim Berners-Lee, into the public domain.  That software was a “global computer networked information system” called the World Wide Web, and CERN’s decision meant that anyone, anywhere, could run a website and do anything with it. In an era when online services were still dominated by proprietary, for-profit walled gardens such as AOL and CompuServe, that was a radical idea.

When Zuckerberg was questioned about the company’s handling of user data and how it essentially handed it off to third parties, he demurred. “For some reason, we haven’t been able to kick this notion, for years, that people think that we sell data to advertisers,” said Zuckerberg. “We don’t.”

Facebook has been rocked by reports of a massive data scrape carried out by Cambridge Analytica and one of its then-contractors, a Cambridge University academic named Aleksandr Kogan. Kogan claims that the data he collected from thousands of Facebook users and their friends—amounting to data on over 50 million users—abided by Facebook’s terms; Cambridge Analytica promises it deleted the data; and Facebook is auditing everyone it can for signs of the data. But while Facebook provided the original data, it wasn’t the only vehicle for Kogan’s app.