"As I have been saying
the privacy frame is bullshit," said another critic. "Facebook is all
about criminal behavior to monopolize ad money."
Wednesday, November 06, 2019
After NBC News on
Wednesday published a trove of leaked documents that show how Facebook
"treated user data as a bargaining chip with external app
developers," White House hopeful Sen. Bernie Sanders declared that it is
time "to break Facebook up."
When British investigative
journalist Duncan Campbell first shared the trove of documents with a handful
of media outlets including NBC News in April, journalists Olivia
Solon and Cyrus Farivar reported that
"Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg oversaw plans to consolidate the social
network's power and control competitors by treating its users' data as a
bargaining chip, while publicly proclaiming to be protecting that data."
With the publication Wednesday
of nearly 7,000 pages of records—which include internal Facebook emails, web
chats, notes, presentations, and spreadsheets—journalists and the public can
now have a closer look at exactly how the company was using the vast amount of
data it collects when it came to bargaining with third parties.
Technically still under
protective order in a California state civil lawsuit that the startup app
developer Six4Three filed against Facebook in 2015, the leaked documents from
the case include 3,799 pages of sealed
exhibits, 2,737 pages of exhibits,
415 pages of related notes
and summaries, and a 20-page memorandum (pdfs).
More than 1,000 pages are labeled "highly confidential."
According to Solon and Farivar
of NBC:
Taken together, they show how
Zuckerberg, along with his board and management team, found ways to tap
Facebook users' data—including information about friends, relationships, and
photos—as leverage over the companies it partnered with. In some cases,
Facebook would reward partners by giving them preferential access to certain
types of user data while denying the same access to rival companies.
For example, Facebook gave
Amazon special access to user data because it was spending money on
Facebook advertising. In another case the messaging app MessageMe was cut off from access to data because it
had grown too popular and could compete with Facebook.
All the while, Facebook
planned to publicly frame these moves as a way to protect user privacy, the
documents show.
Open Markets Institute fellow
Matt Stoller tweeted in
response to NBC's report Wednesday: "As I have been saying the
privacy frame is bullshit. Facebook is all about criminal behavior to
monopolize ad money."
The document dump comes as
Facebook and Zuckerberg are facing widespread
criticism over the company's political advertising policy, which
allows candidates for elected office to lie in the ads they pay to circulate on
the platform. It also comes as 47 state attorneys general, led by Letitia James
of New York, are
investigating the social media giant for antitrust violations.
The Week's national
correspondent Ryan Cooper, who also responded to NBC's report on
Twitter, wrote that
"there are some practical (but not insurmountable) problems with putting
antitrust regulations on say, Amazon. [But] Facebook you could just shut it
down and the world would be a far better place."
The call from Sanders (I-Vt.)
Wednesday to break up Facebook follows similar but less definitive statements from
the senator.
One of Sanders' rivals in the
2020 Democratic presidential primary race, Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.),
released her plan to "Break
Up Big Tech" in March. Zuckerberg is among the opponents of
Warren's proposal, which also targets other major technology companies like
Amazon and Google.
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