As privacy breach after privacy breach has broken over the past year, Facebook has responded to each with the same defense: by using its platform, users have “consented” to the company doing whatever it pleases with their data. With the latest revelation this past week that Facebook has been secretly surveilling users it considers to be a “threat” by repurposing the Facebook app they had willingly installed onto their phones as a tracking beacon, we are once again reminded that what was once ours is now Facebook’s.
After a year in which nearly a decade and a half of Facebook’s privacy breaches were laid bare, it might seem as if it can’t possibly get any worse when it comes to all of the ways Facebook has been repurposing our most personal and private information for its own purposes.
Once again, Facebook proves us wrong.
With its acknowledgement last week that the company has been secretly repurposing its smartphone app as a tracking beacon for users it deems “threats” to the company, we have seen that there is no limit to the ways in which Facebook uses our data.
At the root of all of the disclosures over the past year is the approach Silicon Valley has taken to the privacy, safety and security of its users’ most intimate information.
To Silicon Valley, our personal data is the fuel that powers their economic engines.
By using their platforms, we “consent” to social media companies mining and manipulating us for profit in return for free access.
Yet, even among Silicon Valley standards, Facebook stands alone with the extent to which it has run amok with our data.
Most of the large Silicon Valley companies I’ve spoken to over the years emphasize through and through the idea that user data is owned by users and held in trust by the company. From the official narratives propagated by their public relations staff through private conversations with their employees in social settings, one gets the sense that while their businesses may be built upon user data, they treat that data with the upmost respect. In fact, a common narrative is the recognition that user data is so valuable and is the absolute lifeblood of their companies’ very existence, that it must be protected at all costs from unauthorized access or unethical use.
Not so at Facebook.
It is notable that in the past year as we’ve heard privacy breach after privacy breach involving Facebook, we haven’t heard those same stories from its peers. In fact, much like Zuckerberg’s lonely seat at his Congressional testimony, Facebook has been alone month after month as all of these stories have emerged about how it is using our data.
Most strikingly, almost every one of the privacy stories of the past year have ultimately come back to Facebook’s senior management. Rather than a year of disgruntled employees gone rogue, we’ve heard a year of Facebook’s senior management making very willful decisions to trade our privacy for their profit.
Zuckerberg himself features prominently in many of these stories.
Perhaps one reason for this is the fact that Facebook stands alone among its peers for the absolute power its founder still holds over the company’s decision-making process. By this point in their corporate trajectories, most of its peers had long since brought in “adults,” handing over the reigns from the founders to professional seasoned executives attentive to the outside world.
In contrast, Facebook’s decision making appears little different from that of a maladjusted college kid sitting in his dorm room staring at vast data centers filled with the most intimate information of a quarter of the world’s population and geeking out over all the things he could do with it, with privacy not even a distant thought on his mind.
Indeed, looking back at Zuckerberg’s early dorm room exploits, we see a remarkable parallel in how little the company has changed.
In many ways it is our own fault that we have reached a point where Facebook sees our data as its own.
Society didn’t reach this point overnight. From the uproar a decade ago when Facebook first embarked upon its anti-privacy crusade, its greatest contribution to the trajectory of the web itself has been its skillful reprogramming of societal norms, convincing a quarter of the world’s population that privacy no longer matters.
In turn, no matter what Facebook does to us, we no longer care. We might post a few angry messages to social media, the press might write a few negative articles and policymakers might make a few public denouncements, but within short order the controversy is over and Facebook has normalized a new low to our privacy.
It is amazing to look back just ten years and see how far downwards we’ve come, from being so concerned about our privacy that we were actually willing to boycott Facebook and stage protests outside their doors, to freely accepting the idea that the company may be surveilling everything we say and do to stop us from interfering with its business practices.
Putting this all together, we have reached a point in the trajectory of human society where we fully accept that a single digital dictatorship now has near absolute control over everything we say and see online and increasingly goes further to control us even in the offline world. The fact that Facebook feels that all of our data is its data and that we no longer disagree with that perspective, reminds us that 1984 was just twenty years too early. As Facebook increasingly takes over our lives, our world is becoming Orwellian indeed.
