"...Let’s look first at what the Times’ deeply reported piece actually did. It called well-deserved attention to the broad access to user data that Facebook handed out for years to its platform partners and its evidently lax oversight of those arrangements. And it highlighted several specific arrangements that are worrisome in their own right.
"For instance, the Times reported that Facebook struck deals with several companies that allowed for the sharing of users’ contact lists and address books, partly to enhance Facebook’s shady “People You May Know” recommendation engine. One of those partners was the Chinese firm Huawei, which the U.S. government views as a national cybersecurity risk. Facebook also had a partnership with the Russian tech firm Yandex, which is suspected of Kremlin ties, that gave it access to Facebook user IDs. And not only did it sling user data around, the company failed to reel it back in once its partners no longer needed it.
"All of which is deeply disconcerting, even if the concrete harms remain speculative at this point. (No evidence has yet surfaced that Facebook’s partners misused the data, though it’s certainly possible.) We now know that Facebook’s carelessness with users’ information, highlighted in March by the Cambridge Analytica scandal, extended to its relationships with larger corporate partners, which got even more access than small-time developers. While this is hardly shocking, the Times deserves credit for unearthing the documents that prove it.
"Of course, anyone paying attention already knew Facebook wasn’t exactly Fort Knox when it came to users’ personal information. Moreover, the most alarming new details in the New York Times story, such as agreements that allowed Netflix and Spotify to “read, write, and delete users’ private messages,” appear to have been wildly overblown.
"A response from Facebook on Wednesday evening explained that these permissions were about allowing Facebook users to read, write, and delete their own Facebook messages from within Netflix and Spotify once they linked their accounts and logged in. It was a way of encouraging people to use Facebook features without leaving the streaming app, which was a strategy that Facebook pursued very publicly for years. While there are some key differences, from a functional standpoint it’s loosely analogous to the way that Google allows Apple iOS users to read, write, and delete their Gmail messages from their iPhone. And it makes far more sense than the notion that Facebook would give other big tech companies free rein to effectively steal the identities and communications of its users.
"...The real problem turned up by the Times’ reporting is that Facebook failed to pull the plug on this type of access until last year, even though many of the integrations had been abandoned years earlier. But that sloppiness, while inexcusable, isn’t the part that made headlines.
"What has changed to make this sort of feature the subject of a front-page New York Times exposé? Not Facebook’s privacy practices, which by all accounts were worse several years ago than they are today. No, what has changed is that Facebook has forfeited our trust to the point that we are primed to assume the worst of it.
"That confirmation bias has become so pervasive that even people like Klobuchar let it cloud their understanding of Facebook’s actions. You can see it in her reply to Kelly’s follow-up question, when she says she’s not surprised. You can see it in my own snarky tweet responding to the NYT report, before I dived deeper into its particularities. When your baseline assumption is that Facebook is nefarious, even cartoonishly fictitious misdeeds like letting Spotify delete people’s private Facebook messages don’t surprise you.
"To be clear, Facebook has earned this mistrust, even if it hasn’t earned all of the specific outrages that have been levied against it. From Cambridge Analytica to Zuckerberg’s evasive congressional testimony to the massive data breach to the Definers affair to its internal emails to its perpetual evasiveness about “People You May Know,” the throughline is clear: For most of its history, Facebook has systematically prioritized its own growth over its users’ privacy while claiming to do the opposite."
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