Despite repeated apologies over 14 years from Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook has continued to violate users' privacy, driven primarily by its business model
WiredZeynep Tufekci
Context & Ripple Effects
This piece lands mid-Cambridge-Analytica: days earlier, Facebook itself raised the estimated scope of the data misuse to as many as 87 million people, up from the ~50 million in original reporting. Wired's argument is that the scandal is not an anomaly but the predictable output of an ad-funded model that monetizes personal data at scale.
That framing retroactively recasts Zuckerberg's apology record: his earlier insistence that Facebook simply didn't know about widespread developer misuse claimed ignorance of the problem sits awkwardly against a 14-year pattern of contrition followed by recurrence — and against what would later surface when emails unearthed during FTC inquiries appeared to show he knew of problematic privacy practices all along.
First-order effects
Zuckerberg's credibility strategy collapses under the Wired thesis: if violations are driven by the business model, each new apology functions as PR rather than remediation, raising the political cost of his testimony-era defense that Facebook was merely unaware.
Second-order effects
The FTC's ongoing inquiry gains a sharper theory of the case — corporate knowledge rather than negligence — which is exactly the direction the later-unearthed emails point, increasing pressure for penalties aimed at governance and Zuckerberg personally rather than at discrete product failures.
Third-order effects
If the pattern holds, regulators stop treating each violation as an incident and start targeting the underlying exchange — free services funded by harvested behavioral data — forcing structural changes to how ad platforms collect and share user information with outside developers.
The trend: Privacy enforcement is shifting from punishing individual data breaches to interrogating the ad-funded business models that make breaches structurally inevitable.
“it appears that nobody around Facebook's sovereign & singular ruler has managed to convince their leader that repeated use of “community” to refer Facebook's users is not appropriate and is, in fact, misleading.” @zeynep on the Facebook Stockholm syndrome http://www.wired.com/..…
I'm pretty sure Agent Smith also referred to the human batteries powering the matrix as “our community”. Yet Facebook has achieved even greater scale with its attention extraction contraption using a much cruder simulation of reality.
“By 2008, Zuckerberg had written only four posts on #Facebook's blog: Every single one of them was an apology or an attempt to explain a decision that had upset users”: http://www.wired.com/... @zeynep #ethics #privacy #internet #business #tech #socialmedia
“A community is a set of people with reciprocal rights, powers, and responsibilities. If Facebook really were a community, Zuckerberg would not be able to make so many statements about unilateral decisions he has made” http://www.wired.com/...
Sheryl Sandberg also claimed that Facebook's problem is that they've been “way too idealistic.” I don't know people who work for or run Facebook believe this, but if they do, it shows the power of self-deception—after 15 years of deeds, this doesn't hold. http://www.wired.com/...
Facebook isn't a community; it is a regime of one-sided, highly profitable surveillance, carried out on a scale that has made It one of the largest companies in the world by market capitalization — @zeynep http://www.wired.com/... (via @azeem)
This really is a must read by @zeynep. And it asks the question so many have avoided- “As far as I can tell, not once in his apology tour was Zuckerberg asked what on earth he means when he refers to Facebook's 2 billion-plus users as ‘a community’ or ‘the Facebook community.’” h…
The look back into all the apologies really is something else. It's literally the same act over 15 years and nobody has called him over it http://twitter.com/...
Because the real money in this social media industry come from using the data in various ways not from offering privacy to the users. Why Zuckerberg's 14-Year Apology Tour Hasn't Fixed Facebook http://www.wired.com/... via @WIRED
“Zuckerberg's outright denial that Facebook's business interests play a powerful role in shaping its behavior doesn't bode well for Facebook's chances of doing better in the future.” http://www.wired.com/... via @WIRED
I'm really baffled by the idea Facebook's problems flow from the ad model, and would somehow go away if it was subscription-based. Collecting information about you & what you're interested in isn't something bolted on to make money. It's what we do with it. It's what it IS.
Look the point isn't all this due to some evil conspiracy. I'm not claiming that Facebook employees don't care about users. But incentives and business models shape their behavior—just like other companies and people.
FB deserves to be under microscope, but any tech reporters write a good “what we got wrong about Facebook for the last 14 years” post-mortem yet, bec there was sure a lot of coverage along way that lavished praise, didn't really make data/privacy the ongoing focus.