In a jaw-dropping article confirming your worst fears about Big Tech, the New York Times reports that Facebook effectively exempted large tech conglomerates from Netflix to Spotify from their normal privacy policies to give them unfettered access to individual data. Through the arrangement, Amazon acquired access to users’ contact information, Bing obtained users’ Facebook friends list, and so on.
The Times report comes after more than a year of intense, bipartisan criticism of the company’s handling of user privacy and content aggregation.
Critics on the Left blame CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s uncurbed ambition and largely unregulated capitalist enterprise for stealing the election from Hillary Clinton. Dissenters on the Right point to Facebook’s piecemeal bias against conservative viewpoints, which are banned even as outright death threats and Nazis remain up on the site for days on end. That’s evidence that Zuckerberg is nothing more than a corporate Leviathan with a globalist agenda. Yet these characterizations gloss over Facebook’s true faults of the last decade and the simple fact that Facebook is in the game for profit, not politics.
This report confirms what Facebook users should have known all along: The Cambridge Analytica conundrum was no data breach. Liberals and conservatives alike would be wise to remember that there is no such thing as a free lunch. When you use a platform for “free,” you’re not the consumer; you’re the product.
Facebook provides advertisers with indirect — or, in specific cases as the Times details, direct — access one of the most comprehensive dossiers of consumer behavior in human history. Of course Facebook would capitalize on what effectively serves as consumer reports to maximize its partnerships and profits. The use of personal data in the vein of Cambridge Analytica was not just possible, but inevitable as Facebook permeates more of the global market. As liberals are apt to forget, former President Barack Obama’s 2012 campaign employed nearly the exact same data collection scheme as Cambridge Analytica’s, except that Obama acolytes who downloaded the Obama 2012 app and signed away their Facebook privacy knew that their friends’ information would be used for partisan interests.
Unlike SMS text messages, which can only be involuntarily shared with a subpoena, Facebook messages don’t have the same legal protection. Nor do they have the same economic protection; a free service provider has no obligation to protect its users.
The homepage of Facebook always includes the phrase, “It’s free and always will be.” But nothing is free, including your willingness to give up your privacy for nothing.
