Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg has inexplicably defended Apple in the tech giant’s battle for users’ privacy, despite his own site’s divisive handling of its own users’ personal data.
Zuckerberg defended Apple at the Mobile World Conference 2016 last Sunday, according to Re/code, with the Facebook CEO and founder saying: “We’re sympathetic with Apple on this one. I expect it’s not the right thing to try to block that from the mainstream products people want to use. And I think it’s not going to be the right regulatory or economic policy to put in place.”
But Facebook doesn’t exactly have a good track record of respecting the privacy of its users. In 2012, it was discovered that the social networking site had secretly conducted psychological tests on 700,000 of its users, by purposely hiding a small percentage of “emotional words” on their news feeds to see how this would impact their status updates and likes. Facebook didn’t mention this experiment to their users, with it only becoming public knowledge after it was referenced in a scientific paper published in 2014.
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Then in 2015 Facebook went toe-to-toe with the Belgium government over the company’s implementation of cookies, with it being revealed that the site was potentially using them to track the web activity of both users and non-users of the site. The cookies, which Facebook referred to as Datr, were placed on the browsers of web users who accessed sites that utilized a Facebook plug-in, i.e. the “Like” buttons that are visible on a vast majority of web pages. While Facebook defended itself by claiming that the cookies were being used to protect the privacy of its existing users, the Belgium government won the case, and Facebook was told to halt the policy in the country, along with removing all cookies that had previously been placed in users’ browsers when possible.
Facebook also put forward a new privacy policy in early 2015 that enables the company to individually target users with “personalized” ads, which allows websites that use cookies in order to record visitors to contact Facebook, showing the company the list of these users before the site’s tailored ads will appear on the users’ Facebook news feeds. This privacy policy also saw a new update that stated third-party companies could use the names and profile photos of users.
So with all this evidence of Facebook’s alarmingly ambivalence when it comes to protecting its users’ privacy (and even the privacy of non-users of the site), Zuckerberg’s defense of Apple in the wake of its battle with the FBI feels hollow, to say the least. The CEO’s comments are likely as a result of him not wanting to step into a PR disaster, rather than evidence of him caring about the security issues the FBI’s court order against Apple represents.
