Facebook Testimony: An Open Can of Worms
Mark Zuckerberg is in deep doo-doo, and it’s not with Congress, which largely let him off the hook because it doesn’t have enough knowledge to figure out a solution to the incredible problems Facebook has caused, which emerged during the hearings. It asked him to follow up with some written answers. If you’re interested, Wired has a list of followup questions.
But Mark is in it up to his ears with his own users, because of what they find out when they download their Facebook data, which probably half the world didn’t even know they could do.
This was Brian X. Chen in the Times:
With a few clicks, I learned that about 500 advertisers — many that I had never heard of, like Bad Dad, a motorcycle parts store, and Space Jesus, an electronica band — had my contact information, which could include my email address, phone number and full name. Facebook also had my entire phone book, including the number to ring my apartment buzzer. The social network had even kept a permanent record of the roughly 100 people I had deleted from my friends list over the last 14 years, including my exes.
You would do well to read the article if you care how data is collected and stored. It turns out very little is actually ever deleted by Facebook.
I’m not saying to get off Facebook. I’m saying we need to take a deep dive into our philosophy of privacy and what has happened to it since the internet, because — make no mistake — this is not only Facebook’s problem.
It turns out privacy is a relatively new concept — about 150 years old. But underneath that novelty is a right that many people find core to their humanity. In the old days, people lived in the same room and even slept in the same bed. But once the concept of privacy took hold, it became very powerful very quickly.
The right to privacy is the time-travel paradox of constitutional law: Even though it didn’t exist as a constitutional doctrine until 1961 and didn’t form the basis of a Supreme Court ruling until 1965, it is, in some respects, the oldest constitutional right. It is this assertion that we have “the right to be left alone,” as Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis said, that forms the common foundation of the freedom of conscience outlined in the First Amendment, the right to be secure in one’s person outlined in the Fourth Amendment, and the right to refuse self-incrimination outlined in the Fifth Amendment — despite the fact that the word “privacy” itself appears nowhere in the U.S. Constitution.
In other words, we all think privacy is a right.
But don’t we also think convenience is a “right.”? If you use Amazon, God only knows what data they have, because they’re older and they keep at the very least your shopping history. We don’t really know what its data policies are, either, because Jeff Bezos hasn’t had to testify, yet. And then there’s Google. Both of the latter may already have devices in your home.
So now comes the issue: what are we willing to give up for privacy? Uber? Amazon? Google Maps?
I predict Congress cannot regulate Facebook or any other internet company until it resolves the constitutional question of whether privacy really exists. In Europe, the EU decided it did, and has instituted new rules around data privacy (the GDPR) that take effect on May 25. Facebook told Congress it will comply with those rules in Europe on the given date, and will roll those protections out globally across the platform. But he couldn’t say when we in the US would get them.
We will have a while to watch what the Europeans do once they have to deal with these new rules, which require stringent opt-in language. If, indeed, they do choose to opt in, we will know how important privacy truly isn’t when weighed against instant gratification.
