Users: Our data was stolen.
— James Grimmelmann (@grimmelm) March 18, 2018
FB: It wasn’t “stolen.” An app lied about how it used your data.
Users: Same result. Does it really matter what we ca—
FB: STOP CALLING IT THEFT! IT WAS FRAUD! WE DEFRAUDED YOU! THAT’S WHAT WE DO! STOP CALLING US THIEVES! FRAUD! FRAUD! FRAUD! https://t.co/3O9uYqGq4B
Monday, March 19, 2018
Facebook Fraudsters
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Facebook's business model, indeed, its entire existence, depends upon being able to violate privacy concerns. Facebook users are waking up to just how much private information they have handed over to third-party apps. Users are sharing their shock on Twitter at discovering that thousands of software plugins for Facebook have been gathering their data. Some of the better known apps that may be connected to your profile include those of popular sites like Amazon, Buzzfeed, Expedia, Etsy, Instagram, Spotify and Tinder. This is why I've always stayed anonymous and I have never joined any social internet network.
Yes, it is important to emphasize that facebook's "business model" is the same logic governing the algorithmic surveillance and extraction of what now passes for "social media" and/or "the internet" across the board (since the late 90s or so) and hence the fall of even so grand and terrible a bad actor as facebook -- which I far from expect to happen in any case, much though I would like it to -- will not put an end to the problem facebook so poignantly symptomizes and symbolizes in this moment. Platform monopolization, algorithmic targeting/profiling and disruptive deregulation of public goods defines this phase of corporate-militarism (capitalism), unfortunately for us all, online search, publication, exchange, funding, organizing, expression platforms should be nationalized as indispensable public utilities and made absolutely accountable to the public (or at any rate the monopolies broken up by renewed antitrust, and non-profit public options made available to all). Implementing legible regimes to protect people from fraud, misinformation, and nonconsensual (consent is not clicking a button after scrolling through legal boilerplate you don't read and which you wouldn't understand if you read it anyway) exploitation of personal information will also be necessary -- which would require not only a radical re-orientation of digital media but of the whole suffusion of our public sphere with the deceptive and hyperbolic norms and forms of marketing (including the legal deceptions of consumer advertizing, self-promotional branding norms, and the think-tankification of intellectual life).
That said, while I understand and sympathize with your efforts to remain anonymous online (I stopped using facebook YEARS ago, for example) I would warn you not to imagine there are rugged individualist strategies to elude these structural problems -- facebook for one thing creates profiles of non-users as well as its users and profiles aggregated with and without our knowledge and understanding from public and private databases frame us all, however we seek to evade them (though taking security measures remains prudent as far as that goes of course), and only organized democratic resistance and governance can get us out of this stupid predictable (and predicted) mess. I think everybody should be reading Frank Pasquale, Zeynep Tukekci, David Golumbia, Chris Gilliard, Safiya Noble, and Audrey Watters, among many others (not including me) right now for guidance on these questions.
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