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.