On December 5th, Sue Halpern wrote an article titled “Facebook’s Very Bad Month Just Got Worse,” which detailed the various recent revelations and scandals about the company’s cavalier attitude toward user data and crisis management. Things are now worse than worse. On Tuesday, the Times published an article with further revelations about how Facebook exploited user data to fuel its business growth. “These stories are coming out literally every day, or every couple of days, and there is this sense that we’re getting inured,” Halpern told me, on Wednesday morning. But each revelation matters and adds to what we know about the practices of Facebook and other tech firms that have become integral to our lives.
The Times’s new article, citing internal company documents, reports that Facebook has provided other large companies with more access to its users’ data than it has previously admitted. “Facebook allowed Microsoft’s Bing search engine to see the names of virtually all Facebook users’ friends without consent,” the article says, giving examples, “and gave Netflix and Spotify the ability to read Facebook users’ private messages.” The company entered into so many of these “partnerships” with other companies that its employees built a tool to keep track of them all. Facebook still maintains that it has never sold its users’ data. But Halpern says that the pattern is now clear enough to call out. “Facebook uses language to circumvent the truth,” Halpern told me. “They say, ‘We don’t sell your data.’ And then you’re thinking, huh, that’s interesting—then why does everyone have my data? And the reason is that they’ve created a barter economy. They enter into these agreements in which the currency isn’t dollars, it’s you, or your stuff, whatever they think is valuable about you.”
According to the Times, Facebook’s partnerships “helped drive the platform’s expansion, bringing in new users, spurring them to spend more time on Facebook and driving up advertising revenue.” The term “partnership” itself is loaded, Halpern said. “Instead of calling these partners third parties—they’re not allowed to give data to third parties—they call them part of Facebook,” Halpern said. “We’ve got this semantic slope that they’ve put themselves on that they use to slide into what they call compliance.” But, with every revelation, the 2011 Federal Trade Commission consent agreement that Facebook entered into—which was supposed to safeguard user privacy—looks less and less adequate. Former F.T.C. officials told the Times that the partnership deals detailed in its article “probably violated the agreement.”
Even before the Times’s latest report, the calls for government regulation of Facebook and other big tech companies were getting louder and coming from lawmakers in both major parties. Halpern mentioned a bill proposed by the Democratic senator Ron Wyden, of Oregon—the Consumer Data Protection Act—that would impose long prison sentences on executives of tech companies that commit privacy or cybersecurity violations. “It’s probably not going to pass,” Halpern said. “It’s almost brutal.” Still, she said, “This is not a problem that is going to be solved simply by me or you deleting our Facebook accounts. Although that, too, does send Facebook a message.”