The State of Data Privacy

This past year everyone started paying attention

I began this blog in July of this year with one hope in mind: To help further spread awareness to the issue of data privacy. I urged you, the reader, to join the data resistance because it’s my belief that true, unabashed freedom only exists when you no longer have to worry about whether your digital profile can be weaponized and used against you.

In March, The Guardian’s sister paper, the Observer, broke the story of how the personal Facebook data of 50 million people was improperly obtained by a political consultancy that went on to work for Donald Trump. “We exploited Facebook to harvest millions of people’s profiles,” the whistleblower Christopher Wylie told the Guardian. “And built models to exploit what we knew about them and target their inner demons. That was the basis the entire company was built on.”

In April, WhatsApp co-founder and Facebook board member Jan Koum announced his departure due to conflicts between the privacy-minded WhatsApp team and data-hungry Facebook.

And finally, in September, Facebook announced that nearly 50 million Facebook accounts had been compromised by an attack that gave hackers the the ability to take over users’ accounts.

All of which is to say that data privacy writ large was continuing to impede on the front page of major news outlets but somehow it was still missing from the front page of public discourse and opinion. But now, as 2018 comes to a halt and we are met with one of the biggest privacy scandals of the year — The New York Times investigations squad has reported that for years, Facebook has given Netflix and Spotify had access to private messages while Microsoft’s Bing could view the names of friends — the question of whether data privacy is of focal importance to people has been answered.

Last week, when the news that Facebook’s data-sharing with third parties went beyond what users understood they were agreeing to, mainly that the API allowed major tech companies to see users friends list and even access private messages with vague user consent, there wasn’t a single news channel, radio station or website that wasn’t leading with Facebook’s flagrant misuse of user data. Y’know what, let me rephrase that: There wasn’t a single news outlet under any medium that wasn’t reporting on the fact that Facebook had once again been abusing its power and undermining your trust.

Now, I understand that as is always the case with this sort of news, that there’s sentiment being spread that says:

That the overarching problem is not whether Facebook and other tech behemoths gained true consent to access user data or not. It’s about the fact that people aren’t aware of what is happening with their data, true transparency simply doesn’t exist. Facebook and others KNOW that people aren’t aware…yet aren’t being fully transparent. In a nutshell, that is exploitation.

For the past several years, privacy advocates, myself included, instructed everyone to think before you post, since someone, somewhere is likely watching. But as 2019 comes to and, it’s time to dispel the idea that we should have to live in a world where we accept that the status quo in which tech companies monitor our activity. If the general public’s dissatisfaction and outright disgust with Facebook in 2018 has taught us anything it’s that there is hope for living and being in a free digital world.

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