I spoke with Farai Chideya for an Intercept story about the way that the dossiers Facebook maintains on the world's population are getting more detailed, more compromising, and more aggressively mined, even as the number of people in those dossiers continues to grow.
"Facebook's story is that we trade privacy for access to its service," says Cory Doctorow, a best-selling author, co-editor of the pioneering futurist blog Boing Boing, and consultant for the civil liberties group Electronic Frontier Foundation. "But it's clear that none of us really know what we're trading. People are really bad at pricing out the future value of today's privacy disclosure. … It's nothing like any other marketplace. … In a market, buyers and sellers bargain. In Facebook's 'market,' it gets to treat your private data as an all-you-can-eat buffet and help itself to whatever it wants."
No one goes into Facebook planning to share tons of data. When you signed up, all you wanted to do was upload a few flattering vacation photos because your relationship status was, well, It's Complicated. But people tend to get sucked into Facebook. In 2010, Austrian law student Max Schrems asked for, and eventually received, all the data Facebook had compiled on him. The information arrived in the form of a 1200-page PDF file. It contained both active and deleted personal data, including information on who had "poked" Schrems; a record of who he had friended and de-friended; a list of Facebook users he shared computers with; his RSVPs to various events; email addresses he had never provided Facebook, presumably culled from address books shared with Facebook by his friends; and all his messages and chats, some marked "deleted." He later formed an activist group called Europe v. Facebook and, among other legal maneuvers against the company, filed a complaint with the Data Protection Commissioner in Ireland, where Facebook has its European headquarters, arguing the company's practices violated an amendment to the European Union charter.
If a user like Schrems asked for a data dump today, it would probably look quite different. As Facebook evolves and offers more features, it generates new types of information, information that often remains hidden away. "Social networks foster an environment of mutual participation … on the premise of a social good," says Dr. Richard Tynan of the U.K. organization Privacy International. "However, behind this apparently benign act exists an ecosystem of algorithms and decisions, known only to Facebook."
The Facebook of the Future Has Privacy Implications Today [Farai Chideya/The Intercept]
