Wednesday, December 19, 2018

Facebook Secretly Shared Users' Friend's Data with Business Partners: A Case of Betrayal

According to The New York Times at the end of 2018, internal documents generated at Facebook in 2017 showed that the company “gave Microsoft, Amazon, Spotify, and others far greater access to people’s data” even after having raised a privacy wall than Facebook had disclosed.[1] That is, Facebook effectively exempted some of its business partners from the company’s privacy rules without notifying users. In many quarters, this would be called lying, which in turn would suggest a sordid management at Facebook. The more subtle astonishment, I submit, is that 2.2 billion users had stayed with Facebook after the hidden use of personal data for political purposes. The partnership between Facebook and Cambridge Analytica had hardly been made in heaven. Why such enduring trust in spite of external data being clear grounds for losing trust and giving up using Facebook? How many betrayals would be necessary? In literal marriages, trust can be lost “like that!” Similarly, when a child even unconsciously loses trust for her parents, the solid basis of trust in a normal parent-child relationship is lost most likely forever. Why has Facebook—a distant business punctuated by lies—get a pass?

The full essay is at "Facebook Secretly Betrayed Users."

See also the booklet, Taking the Face Off Facebook, available at Amazon.


1. Gabriel Dance, Michael LaForgia, and Nicholas Confessore, “As Facebook Raised a Privacy Wall, It Carved an Opening for Tech Giants,” The New York Times, December 18, 2018.