A useful summary of the latest Facebook privacy scandal:
We don’t yet know what precise methods Facebook uses to undercut its promises, but one thing is true – the company has made to this reporter, and many other reporters, users, lawmakers, federal agencies, and academics untrue statements with an intent to deceive. And it has created false or misleading impressions. It has lied. And it has done so deliberately. Over and over again.
And it is still lying today. Faced with evidence of its data-sharing agreements where – let’s not forget this – Facebook provided third parties access to people’s personal messages, and more importantly to their contacts lists and friends’ feeds, the company claims it broke no promises because it defined the outfits it signed agreements with as “service providers.” And so, according to Facebook, it didn’t break a pactit has with the US government’s trade watchdog, the FTC, not to share private data without permission, and likewise not to break agreements it has with its users.
Facebook also argues it had clearly communicated that it was granting apps access to people’s private messages, and that users had to link their Spotify, Netflix, Royal Bank of Canada, et al, accounts with their Facebook accounts to activate it. And while Facebook’s tie-ups with, say, Spotify and Netflix were well publicized, given this week’s outcry, arguably not every user was aware or made aware of what they were getting into. In any case, the “experimental” access to folks’ private conversations was discontinued nearly three years ago.
The social network claims it only ever shared with companies what people had agreed to share or chosen to make public, sidestepping a key issue: that people unwittingly had their profiles viewed, slurped, harvested, and exploited by their friends’ connected apps and websites.
As for the question of potential abuse of personal data handed to third parties, Facebook amazingly used the same line that it rolled out when it attempted to deflect the Cambridge Analytica scandal: that third parties were beholden to Facebook’s rules about using data. But, of course, Facebook doesn’t check or audit whether that is the case.
And what is its self-reflective apology this time for granting such broad access to personal data to so many companies? It says that it is guilty of not keeping on top of old agreements, and the channels of private data to third parties stayed open much longer than they should have done after it had made privacy-enhancing changes.
We can’t prove it yet, and may never be able to unless more internal emails find their way out, but let’s be honest, we all know that this is another lie. Facebook didn’t touch those agreements because it didn’t want anyone to look at them. It chose to be willfully ignorant of the details of its most significant agreements with some of the world’s largest companies.
And it did so because it still believes it can ride this out, and that those agreements are going to be what keeps Facebook going as a corporation.
What Zuckerberg didn’t factor into his strategic masterstroke, however, was one critical detail: no one likes a liar. And when you lie repeatedly, to people’s faces, you go from liar to lying asshole. And lying asshole is enough to make people delete your app.
And when that app is deleted, the whole sorry house of cards will come tumbling down. And Facebook will become Friendster.