* Copied (from: COFFEE_KLATSCH) by Roger Nelson using timEd/386 1.10.y2k+.

 Facebook's history betrays its privacy pivot
 
Posted: March 20, 2019 by David Ruiz
 
Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg proposed a radical pivot for his company this
month: it would start caring-really-about privacy, building out a new version
of the platform that turns Facebook less into a public, open "town square" and
more into a private, intimate "living room."
 
Zuckerberg promised end-to-end encryption across the company's messaging
platforms, interoperability, disappearing messages, posts, and photos for
users, and a commitment to store less user data, while also refusing to put
that data in countries with poor human rights records.
 
If carried out, these promises could bring user privacy front and center.
 
But Zuckerberg's promises have exhausted users, privacy advocates,
technologists, and industry experts, including those of us at Malwarebytes.
Respecting user privacy makes for a better Internet, period. And Zuckerberg's
proposals are absolutely a step in the right direction. Unfortunately, there is
 a chasm between Zuckerberg's privacy proposal and Facebook's privacy success.
Given Zuckerberg's past performance, we doubt that he will actually deliver,
and we blame no user who feels the same way.
 
The outside response to Zuckerberg's announcement was swift and critical.
 
One early Facebook investor called the move a PR stunt. Veteran tech journalist
 Kara Swisher jabbed Facebook for a "shoplift" of a competitor's better idea.
Digital rights group Electronic Frontier Foundation said it would believe in a
truly private Facebook when it sees it, and Austrian online privacy rights
activist (and thorn in Facebook's side) Max Schrems laughed at what he saw as
hypocrisy: merging users' metadata across WhatsApp, Facebook, and Instagram,
and telling users it was for their own, private good.
 
The biggest obstacle to believing Zuckerberg's words? For many, it's Facebook's
 history.
 
The very idea of a privacy-protective Facebook goes so against the public's
understanding of the company that Zuckerberg's comments taste downright
unpalatable. These promises are coming from a man whose crisis-management
statements often lack the words "sorry" or "apology." A man who, when his
company was trying to contain its own understanding of a foreign intelligence
disinformation campaign, played would-be president, touring America for a
so-called "listening tour."
 
Users, understandably, expect better. They expect companies to protect their
privacy. But can Facebook actually live up to that?
"The future of the Internet"
 
Zuckerberg opens his appeal with a shaky claim-that he has focused his
attention in recent years on "understanding and addressing the biggest
challenges facing Facebook." According to Zuckerberg, "this means taking
positions on important issues concerning the future of the Internet."
 
Facebook's vision of the future of the Internet has, at times, been largely
positive. Facebook routinely supports net neutrality, and last year, the
company opposed a dangerous, anti-encryption, anti-security law in Australia
that could force companies around the world to comply with secret government
orders to spy on users.
 
But Facebook's lobbying record also reveals a future of the Internet that is,
for some, less secure.
 
Last year, Facebook supported one half of a pair of sibling bills that
eventually merged into one law. The law followed a convoluted, circuitous
route, but its impact today is clear: Consensual sex workers have found their
online communities wiped out, and are once again pushed into the streets, away
from guidance and support, and potentially back into the hands of predators.
 
"The bill is killing us," said one sex worker to The Huffington Post.
 
Though the law was ostensibly meant to protect sex trafficking victims, it has
only made their lives worse, according to some sex worker advocates.
 
On March 21, 2018, the US Senate passed the Allow States and Victims to Fight
Online Sex Trafficking (FOSTA) bill. The bill was the product of an earlier
version of its own namesake, and a separate, related bill, called the Stop
Enabling Sex Traffickers Act (SESTA). Despite clear warnings from digital
rights groups and sex positive advocates, Facebook supported SESTA in November
2017. According to the New York Times, Facebook made this calculated move to
curry favor amongst some of its fiercest critics in US politics.
 
"[The] sex trafficking bill was championed by Senator John Thune, a Republican
of South Dakota who had pummeled Facebook over accusations that it censored
conservative content, and Senator Richard Blumenthal, a Connecticut Democrat
and senior commerce committee member who was a frequent critic of Facebook,"
the article said. "Facebook broke ranks with other tech companies, hoping the
move would help repair relations on both sides of the aisle, said two
congressional staffers and three tech industry officials."
 
Last October, the bill came back to haunt the social media giant: a Jane Doe
plaintiff in Texas sued Facebook for failing to protect her from sex
traffickers.
 
Further in Zuckerberg's essay, he promises that Facebook will continue to
refuse to build data centers in countries with poor human rights records.
 
Zuckerberg's concern is welcome and his cautions are well-placed. As the
Internet has evolved, so has data storage. Users' online profiles, photos,
videos, and messages can travel across various servers located in countries
around the world, away from a company's headquarters. But this development
poses a challenge. Placing people's data in countries with fewer privacy
protections-and potentially oppressive government regimes-puts everyone's
private, online lives at risk. As Zuckerberg said:
 
"[S]toring data in more countries also establishes a precedent that emboldens
other governments to seek greater access to their citizen's data and therefore
weakens privacy and security protections for people around the world,"
Zuckerberg said.
 
But what Zuckerberg says and what Facebook supports are at odds.
 
Last year, Facebook supported the CLOUD Act, a law that lowered privacy
protections around the world by allowing foreign governments to directly
request companies for their citizens' online data. It is a law that, according
to Electronic Frontier Foundation, could result in UK police inadvertently
getting their hands on Slack messages written by an American, and then
forwarding those messages to US police, who could then charge that American
with a crime-all without a warrant.
 
The same day that the CLOUD Act was first introduced as a bill, it received
immediate support from Facebook, Google, Microsoft, Apple, and Oath (formerly
Yahoo). Digital rights groups, civil liberties advocates, and human rights
organizations directly opposed the bill soon after. None of their efforts
swayed the technology giants. The CLOUD Act became law just months after its
introduction.
 
While Zuckerberg's push to keep data out of human-rights-abusing countries is a
 step in the right direction for protecting global privacy, his company
supported a law that could result in the opposite. The CLOUD Act does not
meaningfully hinge on a country's human rights record. Instead, it hinges on
backroom negotiations between governments, away from public view.
 
The future of the Internet is already here, and Facebook is partially
responsible for the way it looks.
Skepticism over Facebook's origin story 2.0
 
For years, Zuckerberg told anyone who would listen-including US Senators hungry
 for answers-that he started Facebook in his Harvard dorm room. This innocent
retelling involves a young, doe-eyed Zuckerberg who doesn't care about starting
 a business, but rather, about connecting people.
 
Connection, Zuckerberg has repeated, was the ultimate mission. This singular
vision was once employed by a company executive to hand-wave away human death
for the "*de facto* good" of connecting people.
 
But Zuckerberg's latest statement adds a new purpose, or wrinkle, to the
Facebook mission: privacy.
 
"Privacy gives people the freedom to be themselves and connect more naturally,
which is why we build social networks," Zuckerberg said.
 
Several experts see ulterior motives.
 
Kara Swisher, the executive editor of Recode, said that Facebook's re-steering
is probably an attempt to remain relevant with younger users. Online privacy,
data shows, is a top concern for that demographic. But caring about privacy,
Swisher said, "was never part of [Facebook's] DNA, except perhaps as a
throwaway line in a news release."
 
Ashkan Soltani, former chief technology officer of the Federal Trade
Commission, said that Zuckerberg's ideas were obvious attempts to leverage
privacy as a competitive edge.
 
"I strongly support consumer privacy when communicating online but this move is
 entirely a strategic play to use privacy as a competitive advantage and
further lock-in Facebook as the dominant messaging platform," Soltani said on
Twitter.
 
As to the commitment to staying out of countries that violate human rights,
Riana Pfefferkorn, associate director of surveillance and cybersecurity at
Stanford Law School's Center for Internet and Society, pressed harder.
 
"I don't know what standards they're using to determine who are human rights
abusers," Pfefferkorn said in a phone interview. "If it's the list of countries
 that the US has sanctioned, where they won't allow exports, that's a short
list. But if you have every country that's ever put dissidents in prison, then
that starts some much harder questions."
 
For instance, what will Facebook do if it wants to enter a country that, on
paper, protects human rights, but in practice, utilizes oppressive laws against
 its citizens? Will Facebook preserve its new privacy model and forgo the
market entirely? Or will it bend?
 
"We'll see about that," Pfefferkorn said in an earlier email. "[Zuckerberg] is
answerable to shareholders and to the tyranny of the #1 rule: growth, growth,
growth."
 
Asked whether Facebook's pivot will succeed, Pfefferkorn said the company has
definitely made some important hires to help out. In the past year, Facebook
brought aboard three critics and digital rights experts-one from EFF, one from
New American's Open Technology Institute, and another from AccessNow-into lead
policy roles. Further, Pfefferkorn said, Facebook has successfully pushed out
enormous, privacy-forward projects before.
 
 
Regards,
 
Roger

--- D'Bridge (SR41)
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