It’s what they do.
Yet everyone is making much ado about an “explosive” report The New York Times published yesterday under the headline: “Facebook Offered Users Privacy Wall, Then Let Tech Giants Around It.”
Here’s the takeaway:
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For years, Facebook gave some of the world’s largest technology companies more intrusive access to users’ personal data than it has disclosed. …
The social network allowed Microsoft’s Bing search engine to see the names of virtually all Facebook users’ friends without consent, the records show, and gave Netflix and Spotify the ability to read Facebook users’ private messages. …
In all, the deals described in the documents benefited more than 150 companies — most of them tech businesses, including online retailers and entertainment sites, but also automakers and media organizations.
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Arguably, this business network of tech companies is what really inspired Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s social network … of virtual friends.
Whatever the case, if this Times report is explosive, then the fuse some of us lit years ago must have caused it. After all, I’ve been trying to smoke Facebook out for years with commentaries like “Facebook Friends?! Try Facebook’s Guinea Pigs,” July 8, 2014, and “Facebook Complaining about NSA Spying? Ha!” March 15, 2014, which includes the following:
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You are probably aware that President Obama appointed a commission to recommend cosmetic changes to the NSA programs. But he only did so to avoid having to point out how stupid the American people are for buying into Snowden’s self-righteous and misguided outrage. After all, the NSA collects metadata for the sole purpose of trying to keep them safe.
By contrast, these outraged nincompoops are showing nary a concern about tech companies tracking every move they make online for the sole purpose of trying to sell them stuff, to say nothing of peddling their personal data to third parties for indeterminate uses. Which makes the open letter Google, Microsoft, Apple, Yahoo!, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and AOL sent to Obama last week complaining about NSA surveillance a classic case of the pot calling the kettle black. And, trust me, ISPs (like Verizon and Comcast) are the worst harvesters and peddlers of your personal data.
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Frankly, this report’s only socially redeeming value is the way it lays bare the complicity of all tech companies, especially the self-righteous Apple.
On the other hand, it’s self-evident that Zuckerberg continues to lie to his users because he thinks they are “dumb f*cks” – as I quoted him saying in “Cambridge Analytica Used Facebook Users as Facebook Intended,” March 20, 2018. This, of course, is the same reason President Trump continues to lie to his Twitter followers.
But Zuckerberg has the added advantage of knowing that he has his 2 billion users so addicted to “Likes,” they can no sooner quit Facebook than fentanyl users can quit opioids. I decried this narco-feature of Facebook’s business model in “Confessions of Facebook Programmers/FAD Pushers Continue,” December 14, 2017.
Meanwhile, this Times report has Facebook users threatening (yet again) to delete their accounts. And Congress is trying to match their exercise in futility by threatening to regulate Facebook out of business.
But I presaged this folly afoot in many commentaries, including most recently in “Data Breach More About Stupid Users than Greedy Facebook,” April 13, 2018. It includes this cynical but instructive truth:
It behooves Congress to appreciate that regulating Facebook to stop data breach is like censoring the NRA to stop gun violence. After all, most Facebook users are so stupid, they don’t even realize that deleting Facebook in favor of sharing all on Instagram is like jumping from the frying pan into the fire.
Frankly, the trending #DeleteFacebook is rather like treating opioid addiction with aspirin.
That said, big-tobacco and big-pharma firms will readily attest that crusading attorneys general pose far greater risks to their bottom line than grandstanding politicians. That’s why Facebook will find this news far more explosive than that report:
Nine months after a whistleblower revealed Facebook had allowed outsiders to improperly access personal information about millions of its users, the social media giant faced its first major rebuke from regulators in the United States – a lawsuit filed by the attorney general of the District of Columbia.
The lawsuit from Karl Racine on Wednesday targeted Facebook mainly for its entanglement with Cambridge Analytica, a political consultancy that harvested names, ‘likes’ and other data from the social site without users’ permission.
(The Washington Post, December 19, 2018)
So here’s to lawsuits hitting Facebook where it hurts.
Apropos of which, reports are that Zuckerberg has lost $20 billion in net worth since the Cambridge Analytica “revelations.” But that leaves over $50 billion in ill-gotten gains for other state attorneys general to join Racine in clawing back from this venal data pusher. That prospect is worthy of at least 2 billion “Likes.”
Related commentaries:
Facebook guinea pigs…
FAD pushers…
Cambridge analytica…
Data breach…