social media

In business, as in life, sometimes it takes a crisis to level up.

For businesses using social media, that crisis—one of the many ripples caused by the Cambridge Analytica scandal—hit this past spring. Social media platforms everywhere, trying to prevent another breach of customer trust, abruptly limited businesses' ability to collect their own online data. With that change, organizations faced a conundrum: They can't afford to withdraw from social media or other online communications, but they're still obligated to remain good stewards of all of their data.

And, in an unexpected twist, that may have revealed the silver lining of the entire situation—at least for businesses dealing with the preservation demands of e-discovery and regulatory compliance.

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Cambridge Analytica: What Happened

In the run up to the 2016 U.S. presidential election, the Trump campaign hired data analysis firm Cambridge Analytica to “identify the personalities of American voters and influence their behavior.” How? By scraping private information from the profiles and activities of more than 50 million Facebook users, in violation of Facebook's rules.

The immediate fallout of the Cambridge Analytica scandal was a deep public distrust of how corporations and social media platforms collect and use personal information. After all, Facebook users weren't sharing their thoughts and pictures in hopes that they'd be studied, dissected, or manipulated for political gain.

But by and large, people didn't stop using social media; it's become an established means of daily communication, regardless of whether people genuinely trust it. According to the Pew Research Center in 2017, two of every three people in the U.S. got at least some of their news through social media sites. Successful businesses seeking to establish name recognition must go where the customers are—and that means they too need to be online and on social media. From marketing and advertising to answering customer questions, businesses recognize the importance of social media in customers' lives.

Cambridge Analytica's scheme wouldn't have worked if social media really didn't matter. But, of course, it did—and the fallout didn't end with customer skepticism.

Social media platforms also responded promptly, limiting the ways that their data could be accessed. Previously, businesses looking to collect and preserve their online communications—or to nefariously scrape the personal data of private users—could do so using platform-based APIs. APIs, short for application program interfaces, provide a means of downloading data from an application like Instagram or Facebook.

In the wake of Cambridge Analytica, several major social media sites throttled or completely deprecated their APIs to protect customer data. That cut off the ability for external companies to use those APIs to collect their own data. That was good for customers worried about another data breach, of course, but bad for businesses that needed to capture data for e-discovery or regulatory compliance.

Or was it?

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An Unexpected Silver Lining

APIs have always been a limited way to capture online data. Data collected with an API is transformed into a different format, losing any dynamic content or context it originally had. API collections aren't necessarily warranted to be accurate. And APIs are controlled entirely by platforms—as evidenced by their shutdown—leaving businesses that relied on them for data collection at the platform's mercy.

That chicken came home to roost after Cambridge Analytica. Fortunately, it's pointed businesses to a better way to preserve and collect their online content: using legally defensible native-format capture.

With native-format capture, businesses can preserve websites and social media conversations as they actually happened. Imagine exploring a collected website as if it were still live: viewing comments and reactions, following links, sorting comments chronologically, or playing back video in the context of an original post. APIs could never do that. What better way to show a court or a regulatory agency how you communicated with a customer than to show how a social media user would have experienced the page in real time?

There's another layer of protection with native-format capture: working with a reputable third party to collect data can offer a shield against allegations of improper data use. Many corporations have long preferred third-party collections to enhance the credibility, independence, and legal defensibility of their e-discovery or compliance processes and, ultimately, their data. That independence is all the more important after Cambridge Analytica, when people are increasingly skeptical about how businesses are using their data.

We can no longer deny the incredible power of social media data. Before Cambridge Analytica, the potential of that data was hidden in plain sight, underappreciated and often entirely unrecognized, with no one guarding the “back door” allowing free access to it. The Cambridge Analytica scandal exposed both the power of that information and the ease of access to it.

Now that door has been shut. Businesses that were tied to API collection methods are being forced to break free—and that's leading them to the advantages of native-format capture.

The silver lining of Cambridge Analytica's breach of trust may turn out to be the ability for organizations to capture confidence in their online data collection—while recapturing customer confidence in the security of their information.

Evan Gumz is an attorney with a decade of experience in e-discovery. At Hanzo, as senior account executive, e-discovery, Evan helps law firms and enterprises find solutions for preserving and collecting dynamic web content including social media, websites, video, and collaborative platforms to the highest standards in authenticity and legal defensibility. Prior to Hanzo, he worked at Compliance Discovery Solutions, Morgan Lewis & Bockius LLP, and Pepper Hamilton LLP in Philadelphia.