Facebook’s lawyer has denied the social media platform invaded American users’ privacy when it allowed their personal data to be slurped up by Cambridge Analytica, claiming they had no privacy to begin with. No crime, no victims?
“There is no invasion of privacy at all, because there is no privacy,” attorney Orin Snyder argued in a motion to have a class-action lawsuit against Facebook dismissed in California’s Northern District Court this week. The suit alleges Facebook’s failure to protect user data from predatory third parties like Cambridge Analytica constitutes invasion of privacy, breach of contract, and negligence and violates other privacy statutes.
© Reuters / Stephen Lam
“You have to closely guard something to have a reasonable expectation of privacy,” Snyder explained, claiming that Facebook is merely a “digital town square” where users voluntarily dispense with any notion of privacy and any “reasonable Facebook user” would have been aware that third-party app-makers could access their data through friends’ activity.
US District Court Judge Vince Chhabria pointed out that just last month, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg was rapturously declaring “the future is private!” and announcing the company’s privacy-focused new direction – a far cry from Snyder’s scornful dismissal of the concept. Nor did Chhabria agree with the Facebook lawyer’s assertion that users were explicitly informed of the limits of their privacy through the platform’s terms of service, suggesting that a user who signed up 10 years ago probably hadn’t read those terms every time the company changed them.
Facebook, which had previously described the class-action suit filed earlier this year as “a kitchen sink-like lobbing of 50 claims - all in the hopes that something, anything, sticks,” complained that if the plaintiffs are so anxious about privacy and digital life in general, they can stop using Facebook at any time. Chhabria was not amused.
The California suit is dwarfed by the pile of legal issues currently facing Facebook, including an FTC probe that the company expects to top $5 billion, criminal probes over its secret (and possibly illegal) data-sharing deals with third-party corporations, and government sanctions from multiple countries.
Original: https://www.rt.com/news/460790-facebook-lawyer-denies-privacy-exists/
If it's not obvious, that's total bullshit. You can set your blog to friends only and set privacy controls on pictures...yet the privacy controls are severely lacking when it comes to apps. There is no way in hell that the Cambridge Analytica scandal is the only case where users privacy was violated. Facebook didn't provide adequate protections for user's privacy and it was abused. I guarantee that there have been TONS more violations. It's just a matter of them being uncovered.
I imagine if a few reporters took the time to look into whether or not there were other companies that did similar, they would find many. That would likely not be good for Facebook.
But, the options for users isn't great. They have no option other than to agree to the TOS and Privacy Policy that Facebook sets forth, or not use Facebook, which for a long time was a monopoly. And then once there, if they chose to be active, there were many apps that they might be pushed to use by other user to figure out what character they were or whatever, each one of them being a possible data breach because Facebook did not properly guard their user information. There was no one minding the store. No one was checking if anyone was robbing it.
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The solution is quite simple, all social media users should join Steem, Whaleshares, Voice, Minds, or any other crypto social media that they want. No more power for the greedy ones.
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I'm not sure if they'll join Steem or other crypto medium, but if these companies keep mucking it up, they might just have bunches of users and creators jumping ship to other platforms, and we'll end up having to create portals to follow people from all over, and they'll lose their power.
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Hopefully we could create an attractive alternative for traditiinal social media here on Steem. Maybe a killer dapp that resembles WhatsApp, Instagram and Facebook.
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That lawyer argument is similar to the one that rapist declare when they say that the woman they violated was provoking him to do so... just disgusting.
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If Facebook has a problem protecting it's user privacy, how in the world did they proposing stable coin. That's total BS...
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