User consent: fail.

Friends of friends consent: fail.

Information safeguards: fail.

Corporate accountability: epic fail.

The Facebook, Inc. report card presented by federal privacy commissioner Daniel Therrien last week can be likened to an end-of-term standoff between a frustrated parent and a contrite child.

Except that contrition has never been a Facebook character trait. Therrien, whose office conducted the investigation into Facebook jointly with the privacy commissioner for British Columbia, should be commended for the clarity of his condemnation of the social media monolith, with its “empty” privacy network, its “vague” and “elastic” terms of use, its “superficial and ineffective safeguards.”

The specifics are galling, if not surprising. Without rehashing the details of the Aleksandr Kogan-created This is Your Digital Life (TYDL) app, and the misappropriation of 50 million Facebook user profiles, and the intersection with SCL Elections Ltd., parent to Cambridge Analytica, and the targeting of political messages and the outcome of the 2016 U.S. presidential election, pause on this: not only did Facebook not provide Therrien’s office with the requested copy of TYDL’s privacy policy, it confirmed that it never reviewed the policy and didn’t bother to confirm that user’s consent was adequately sought.

In Zucked, Roger McNamee reminds us that at the time Facebook was operating under a consent decree struck with the U.S. Federal Trade Commission barring the company from deceptive privacy practices. The misuse of personal data dated to 2009. “The decree required explicit, informed consent from users before Facebook could share their data,” McNamee writes of Facebook’s failure to safeguard user privacy. “You could almost sense a shock wave as people understood the ease with which Kogan had harvested 50 million profiles. Facebook made it look easy.”

Facebook’s broad stance: not to worry, the protocols have been tightened. What’s past is past.

Its Canada stance: Canadian users were not affected.

In Ontario, 142 “installing users” begat 299,793 “affected users.” The point is not whether that information was ever weaponized but rather, as Therrien concluded, that there exists “no assurance that Canadians’ personal information was not shared with SCL.” (Italics mine.)

What is the risk that the personal information of Canadians will be used in ways unknown to the user? High, the privacy commissioner concludes, pointing out that in 2018 there were more than 40 million apps and sites integrated with Facebook.

This time last year, as Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg appeared before a U.S. Senate committee hearing, I wrote that the Facebook leviathan was too big to control. Hardly an original thought. But as some media commentators became preoccupied with out-of-touch questions from some senators, the Zuckerberg deflections were the more serious. That, and the company’s inability to identify what Zuckerberg called “bad content.”

A year ago, the dissemination of hate speech and the Rohingya crisis in Myanmar was top of mind. This spring season we can look to Christchurch and the live-streamed broadcast of the slaughter at two New Zealand mosques. As I wrote then, Facebook defensively noted that the video was viewed “fewer than 200 times” during the live broadcast. Though as the Facebook executive went on to say, the video was viewed about 4,000 times before being removed. In the first 24 hours, the company removed about 1.5 million videos of the attack, with the same executive proudly pointing out that more than a million of those videos were blocked at upload.

I suspect that Daniel Therrien would look at the horror this way: 300,000 video uploads were not.

I have made my opinion about Facebook clear across a series of columns.

And I’m just a lowly journalist.

But Roger McNamee knows and has advised Zuckerberg (why do some journalists call the Facebook CEO “Zuck” as if they are friends?). It was difficult to get through a page of Zucked without placing a check mark here, a circle there, the occasional exclamation point.

“Imagine a stew of unregulated capitalism, addictive technology, and authoritarian values, combined with Silicon Valley’s relentlessness and hubris, unleashed on billions of unsuspecting users,” McNamee writes. “I think the day will come, sooner than I could have imagined two years ago, when the world will recognize that the value users receive from the Facebook-dominated social media/attention economy revolution masked an unmitigated disaster for our democracy, for public health, for personal privacy, and for the economy.”

McNamee makes a further point that’s frequently missed: Facebook is a threat to innovation. Such is the natural consequence of a monopoly.

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What McNamee calls Facebook’s inattention to its impact on democracy could also be described as arrogance. Reading through the privacy commissioner’s report, that’s the corporate character trait that seems to prevail.

Can Facebook be fixed?

McNamee proposes aggressive antitrust action. That’s a must do. He also reminds the reader that each and every one of us has a role to play in the solution. Make your voice heard.

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