Divya Narendra took Mark Zuckerberg to court in 2004 over IP infringement over Facebook and walked away with a deal believed to be worth over a million dollars. He now runs an online social community targeting professional investors – SumZero.com. In an email interview with Ishani Duttagupta, he defends FB. Excerpts:Do you think Facebook faces an uncertain future in view of the current crisis?Every company faces ups and downs, but I think FB has a long runway of growth ahead of it over the next 5 – 10 years due to its portfolio of apps along with the enormous investments they are making to keep improving the platform. Actually, this recent ordeal reminds me of FB’s IPO in 2012. Immediately after going public, investors were worried about whether the company would be able to monetize its mobile app, resulting in a significant drop in stock price. Ultimately FB was able to transform its business to being largely mobile-first and never looked back. Today, the majority of the company’s revenues are driven of mobile advertising which is a complete reversal from its pre-IPO days. Do you think the charges of tracking phone calls and text messages now makes the crisis even more serious?I think you’re referring to the tracking on Messenger which is an opt-in feature, and as such, shouldn’t be conflated with the issues related to Cambridge Analytica.What do you think are the big innovations that Facebook has done in recent months?A lot of the innovation at Facebook is happening behind the scenes. Ironically, security is an area where they have made enormous investments – hiring 15,000+ employees to focus on security before the Cambridge Analytica story broke out. This is an astonishing allocation of resources when compared to FB’s total employee base which was 25,000 as of December 2017. By its nature, users cannot easily see the results of these efforts but when you look at the scale of FB with 2 billion users globally, you start to appreciate the monumental task they face in terms of protecting the site from bad actors. Outside of security, FB is investing heavily into artificial intelligence and machine learning which will benefit user experience across all of their platforms (FB, Instagram, Whatsapp, Messenger, & Oculus). Besides politics, what are the other areas which could be impacted by data privacy issues?As an entrepreneur, it amazes me how politics seems to infiltrate every aspect of our lives. This particular story is a great example of that. No one in the media was complaining about Facebook when Barack Obama leveraged social media back in 2008 to win the presidency. The #fakenews movement only took hold during the Trump era. There is a degree of intellectual dishonesty here that’s hard to miss. I can’t speak for India’s media, but in the US, the media tends to lean Left, which is why you’ll read many articles placing blame on FB (which is by definition a neutral platform) instead of focusing on the many bad actors who attempt to sway the public with falsehoods through every possible channel (FB, TWTR, GOOG, print media, TV, blogs, etc.). Given FB’s global scale, the company clearly has a social responsibility to hold advertisers to standards that ensure a sufficient level of veracity throughout the platform, but I think the public also has to realise that it’s virtually impossible to police such a large pool with 100% accuracy. Moreover, we, as society, should not expect FB to espouse any political bias itself. It is among many things, a venue for discourse, and as such, should enable individuals to speak their minds freely subject to the constraint that they aren’t promoting outright vitriol and/or fabrications. The solution will no doubt be a combination of greater transparency from advertisers, stricter policies regarding user profile information, and AI-enabled oversight. Some of these tools are already in place but I think it will take the company time to accelerate the development of these initiatives to safeguard the community further. I also believe FB’s long-term economic incentives align well with calls from the public for more stringent privacy controls.Outside of the US, the Facebook crisis has now spread to other countries such as India and the UK as well – do you see Facebook’s global business getting hit in a big way?There is no doubt legitimate concern that the company’s global brand has taken a hit recently. But I think over time, the company will weather the storm. They have every economic and moral incentive to solve the problem at hand and emerge as an even stronger business. Their best defence is going to be offence in terms of releasing new privacy controls and stricter data access rules over the coming weeks & months. You have spoken out in favour of Facebook – what are your arguments in its favour?I’ve simply said that users and investors should calm down before jumping to conclusions about what FB did vis-à-vis Cambridge Analytica. There are multiple ongoing audits and investigations that will sort out what exactly happened here. I just think it’s important to let the facts present themselves first instead of relying on news headlines which are often hyperbolic in tone. Please share some details about your company and your future plans – do you have any business in India?I run an online social community targeting professional investors – SumZero.com. With more than 15,000 pre-screened professionals collaborating on a fully-transparent platform, SumZero fosters the sharing of thousands of proprietary investment ideas every year, and offers several ancillary services in support of that effort. We would love to see more investors from India on the platform, and we welcome them all to apply for access. SumZero actually has a growing repository of research on Indian companies and an even larger pool of research on Asia-based companies as many of our members are based in concentrated financial centers such as Hong Kong, Singapore and Mumbai. The investment research on SumZero is rigorous and serves as an alternative to the equity research offered by traditional Wall Street banks such as Goldman Sachs & Morgan Stanley, which we believe to be hamstrung by conflicts of interests. 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