Oversight
How Facebook Borrows From the NSA Playbook
The social media giant misleads the American people using tactics ripped straight from the surveillance agency
Once again, Facebook is embroiled in a scandal where it was caught violating millions of people’s privacy. A blockbuster story published by the New York Times before the holidays revealed that Facebook had entered into secret “partnerships” with various technology companies — Amazon, Microsoft, Netflix, Spotify, and others — that gave hundreds of internet giants vast access to private information for years without Facebook users’ consent.
As the Atlantic’s Alexis Madrigal succinctly put it, “Facebook didn’t sell your data; it gave it away.”
With Congress now embroiled in a government shutdown, it’s still unclear how it will all play out. But Facebook’s tactics — both how it evades oversight from government regulators and how it has misled journalists and the American public — eerily resembles the culprit in this decade’s other major privacy scandal: the National Security Agency (NSA).
In hiding what it was doing from its users and in the underhanded ways it has justified its invasive actions after the fact, Facebook seems to have drawn directly from the NSA’s playbook.
