News

Playboy quits Facebook after 'data mismanagement' exposed user info

Lifestyle brand will deactivate its pages, which have over 25 million fans

29 Mar 2018

Playboy has become the latest company to take action against Facebook in the wake of the Cambridge Analytica data scandal, deleting its Facebook pages and suspending its activity on the platform.

The lifestyle brand stated that the decision to abandon Facebook was partially based on its historic difficulty in complying with the social network's "strict content and policy guidelines", stating that it has had to censor itself in order to fit in with Facebook's views. The news of Facebook's mishandling of user data, however, was apparently the final straw.

"The recent news about Facebook's alleged mismanagement of users' data has solidified our decision to suspend our activity on the platform at this time," the company said in a statement. "There are more than 25 million fans who engage with Playboy via our various Facebook pages, and we do not want to be complicit in exposing them to the reported practices."

Playboy joins other notable companies like Elon Musk's Tesla and SpaceX in deleting their official Facebook pages, while large advertisers like Mozilla suspend their advertising activities on the platform and public figures like Cher and Adam McKay close their accounts.

According to a survey of more than 2,600 tech workers by collaboration app Blind, tech workers are also deserting Zuckerberg's platform in droves; 50% of surveyed Microsoft employees said they would delete Facebook, along with 38% of Google workers and 34% of Amazon staff. Embarrassingly, the survey also revealed that 2% of workers from Facebook itself were planning to delete their accounts.

The ongoing scandal has wiped at least $80 billion from Facebook's stock market value and put the company under an uncomfortable spotlight from regulators and lawmakers, who are beginning to question just how much data Facebook holds and how it should be using it.