Lawmakers only think protecting your data privacy is important when said data is being collected by a private organization. The same congressmen and women who have routinely undermined Fourth Amendment rights are now arguing that Facebook hasn’t done enough to protect its users’ publicly available data.
During a cringe-worthy hearing Tuesday afternoon, senators grilled Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg with questions about the company’s privacy policies. The hearing was sparked by the revelation that data from some 87 million Facebook users was collected by Cambridge Analytica, a political consulting firm linked to the 2016 Trump campaign.
Senators from both sides of the aisle took the opportunity to argue that this was a huge breach of data privacy and that the government needed to step in to ensure Facebook better protect users’ data. That’s terrifying, seeing as the federal government has a shoddy record of protecting its own data — see the leaks of some of the National Security Agency’s biggest secrets and hacking tools, for example.
Sen. Bill Nelson, D-Fla., told Zuckerberg, “If you and other social media companies do not get your act in order, none of us are going to have any privacy.” Sen. John Thune, R-S.D., said the Cambridge Analytica scandal was tantamount to a “privacy nightmare.”
These allegations are laughable coming from two Senators who both voted in favor of reauthorizing one of the most controversial government surveillance programs, Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, which has continually eroded data privacy. This bill grants the U.S. intelligence community warrantless access to the private data of American citizens who happen to communicate with foreigners. Thune even went as far as co-sponsoring a bill with Sen. Tom Cotton, R-Ark., that would have made Section 702 permanent. That would have been a huge abdication of congressional oversight of federal spying powers, as this surveillance program currently is required to be reauthorized every six years by Congress.
Congressional hypocrisy on privacy doesn’t discount the fact that there are some troubling aspects of what Facebook shared with Cambridge Analytica. For example, the consulting firm was able to obtain private messages from users who clicked to grant access to their private inboxes. But, at the end of the day, that’s the difference between Facebook and the federal government — consent. If someone were to read through the terms and conditions on Facebook instead of blindly signing, they could protect their own data. The federal government doesn’t give you any such option before scooping your data up in backdoor searches.
What these senators fail to understand is that, unlike the data collected by the warrantless surveillance programs that they’ve routinely supported, the data Cambridge Analytica obtained was almost entirely information that Facebook users willingly put out in a public space.
Don’t be fooled by the Senate probing of Zuckerberg. They aren’t suddenly civil libertarian champions. Data privacy only matters to them when there are political points to be scored or sound bites to be had.
Dan King (@Kinger_Liberty) is an advocate for Young Voices and a journalist who covers surveillance, civil liberties and free speech.
