If you still use fb, messenger, Instagram, or WhatsApp, you accept that.
If you work there, you don’t believe privacy is more important than the money you make. You could work elsewhere, but you choose to spy instead.
Given how profoundly big tech has failed to act responsibly with the power it has amassed, I think it's both inevitable and a good idea.
And I say that as a libertarian who works in software.
I'll take the US gov's track record wrt protecting speech vs what we're seeing with the tech industry right now.
Having said all of that, I wonder why FB gets piled on here vs Google. Google is just as bad, if not worse, and they have control of both a widely deployed browser and an operating system.
And at least Google doesn't tend to reset our privacy settings to "share freaking everything" every year or so like Facebook did. On that, they're actually less scummy than my bank is with data sharing.
But that doesn't really matter. Even if Google made only the most innocent products known to exist, how can that justify that they abuse those products and build huge databases of private data to be shared with their advertisers?
> And at least Google doesn't tend to reset our privacy settings to "share freaking everything" every year or so like Facebook did.
Can you elaborate on this? Do you have at least one example of Facebook undoing a user's privacy settings?
https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2012/08/future-changes-t...
However this was a feature that they launched 12 years ago. Since then Facebook have added more and more granular privacy controls and they have made their API and Ads product increasingly more data restricted in the past 5-6 years.
I don't believe there has ever been a case, where they have reset a privacy setting that was specifically set by the user.
It's a pattern of behavior on the part of Facebook to not act in the public interest until faced with overwhelming legal or public opinion issues. At least Google is smart enough to see which way the wind is blowing. But sure, continue to support a company that was complicit in the Rohingya genocide though willful ignorance to problems in general. I'm not a Stallmanite but there has to be a point where enough is enough.
This is not to take away from the good engineers who worked on React or HHVM. Just consider working for a less morally bankrupt company, please.
Imagine if on top of everything they now collect they can also see every email content (like Gmail, Hotmail, end others).
https://m.facebook.com/notes/facebook/see-the-messages-that-...
In contrast, FB seems to just want everything, and they're much more subtle about how they get it. But worse than that, I constantly see information about friends and myself from FB in places that it didn't seemed like it belonged. Right from the very, very beginning: remember when websites would show you people that "liked" them, and your friends would be at the top? That kind of shit just screams "leakiness" and it's why even since 2005 or so I gave as little information to FB as possible.
FB's problem is that their business model requires them to exploit some users information to generate content for other users. They've been getting more and more aggressive about this over time. It used to just be your friends content, and people seemed OK with that. But as they pushed the limits further and further, it's getting too fucking weird and people don't like it.
Google isn't like this. Google shows me ads when I search for stuff about what I'm searching for. They show me ads in maps when I'm looking for places. That doesn't bother me. The FB equivalent would be telling me about my friends who also searched for this, or also went to this place (hell, FB does this, a perfect example of what I was saying above). If Google starts doing that kind of shit, that will be the end of Google for me.
They track you across the entire internet on unrelated websites via Google Analytics, their ad network, reCaptcha, ...
They might not directly sell this data directly to third parties (for now), but they sell it in the form of more targeted ads thanks to a better profile.
They certainly have a lot of data on you that you never intentionally gave them.
Note that I'm not trying to say that the information FB or Google collects is OK or not. Only that I think this is why the general public is pissed off at FB and not (as much) Google.
Because this is not about what's actually being done but about likability of the founder(s).
The moment FB stops collecting it will be the moment that FB stops handing in our info to govs. Govs are somehow in this loop.