Facebook has been on the receiving end of fierce criticism following the press’ keen (and relatively sudden) interest in its business model, which includes selling harvested user data to third-party groups.
We should welcome the attention that is being paid now to mammoth tech groups like Facebook and Google. We should cheer that these companies are being pressed seriously to answer for how they handle private user data. Indeed, this difficult and unpleasant conversation about the intersection of social media and the general erosion of personal privacy is long overdue.
Because now that we’re at least talking about this issue, it is becoming painfully clear to more than just a niche group of people that the tech giants really are not taking the issue seriously.
Consider, for example, a New York Times report published this week, titled, “Is Facebook Just a Platform? A Lawyer to the Stars Says No,” which includes the following passage:
This is a quite possibly the worst idea since the Zune. In fact, this is probably one of the worst ideas proposed by any major company in two decades.
Maybe it’s just me, but it seems increasingly clear that the concept of “privacy” is more of a niggling side-issue to some of these tech companies. Things like this reported pilot program are data points in a larger trend showing Silicon Valley isn’t taking this issue seriously, and that its leaders haven’t thought through the matter carefully.
The criticism that Facebook has taken following the 2016 presidential election is mostly legitimate, though it also feels long overdue (harvesting Facebook data to micro-target voters isn’t exactly new). Far be it from me to discourage scrutiny for what these tech giants are doing with our personal and private data.
Honestly, though, nothing that Facebook did in 2016 compares to this monumentally stupid and ill-conceived self-submitted nudes project.
Because surely nothing could go wrong with a single, massive social network collecting and maintaining a database of thousands (if not millions) of extremely compromising images of its users.
There’s only one way this program ends, and that’s in a river of tears.
