Facebook’s FTC settlement only redirected its surveillance practices into new tracking methods

Evidence

In 2012 the company announced it would target ads based on mobile app use, as it worked with Datalogix to determine when online ads result in a real-world purchase. This gambit required mining personal information, including e-mail addresses, from user accounts. In 2012 Facebook also gave advertisers access to targeting data that included users’ e-mail addresses, phone numbers, and website visits, and it admitted that its system scans personal messages for links to third-party websites and automatically registers a “like” on the linked web page. By 2014, the corporation announced that it would be tracking users across the internet using, among its other digital widgets, the “Like” button, in order to build detailed profiles for personalized ad pitches. Its “comprehensive privacy program” advised users of this new tracking policy, reversing every assertion since April 2010 with a few lines inserted into a dense and lengthy terms-of-service agreement. No opt-out privacy option was offered. The truth was finally out: the bug was a feature. — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 500

Categorization

• XREF: The ‘bug was a feature’ line crystallizes the extraction-imperative dynamic that recurs throughout the book; extends the architecture-of-concealment point from earlier chapters. — connects to: Facebook stores user tracking data in a separate system it refuses to expose — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 1542
• CANDY: ‘The bug was a feature’ is a compact, quotable summary of how Facebook’s privacy violations were by design rather than accident.

Broader Connections

• Facebook stores user tracking data in a separate system it refuses to expose #expands (0.75) — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 1542