Facebook Is a Problem. The System It Feeds Is a Bigger One.
Alarm over a new report shouldn’t stop at the social network
It’s easy, at this point, to see any Facebook scandal as more white noise; a few million people betrayed by the social network, an egregious overreach into a user’s personal data — another day online. But you shouldn’t sleep on a fresh New York Times report about the company’s dealings with other tech behemoths, like Apple, Amazon, Netflix, Spotify, Microsoft, Russia’s Yandex, and even, curiously, the Royal Bank of Canada. It follows similar reporting from the Wall Street Journal earlier this year and a related document dump from U.K. parliament just this month, but adds significantly more context to the well-established narrative that Facebook has repeatedly violated the trust of its 2.27 billion monthly users in pursuit of growth and profit.
Don’t miss the forest for the trees, though. If it’s easy to ignore the ceaseless drone of ethical violations from the social network, turn your attention instead to the companies who happily shared in the harvesting of your personal data to bolster their own products — without clear disclosures or any consent whatsoever. Facebook is a problem, but the online economy that trades on your data is a bigger one.
