This weakness has long been apparent to activists toiling on the fringes of debate—and the dangers might even have been apparent to most users of Facebook. But it’s one thing to abstractly understand the rampant exploitation of data; it’s another to graphically see how our data can be weaponized against us. And that’s the awakening occasioned by the rolling revelation of Facebook’s complicity in the debacle of the last presidential campaign. The fact that Facebook seems unwilling to fully own up to its role casts further suspicion on its motives and methods. And in the course of watching the horrific reports, the public may soon arrive at the realization that it is the weakness of our laws that has provided the basis for Facebook’s tremendous success.

If we step back, we can see it clearly: Facebook’s business model is the evisceration of privacy. That is, it aims to induce its users into sharing personal information—what the company has called “radical transparency”—and then aims to surveil users to generate the insights that will keep them “engaged” on its site and to precisely target them with ads. Although Mark Zuckerberg will nod in the direction of privacy, he has been candid about his true feelings. In 2010 he said, for instance, that privacy is no longer a “social norm.” (Once upon a time, in a fit of juvenile triumphalism, he even called people “dumb fucks” for trusting him with their data.) And executives in the company seem to understand the consequence of their apparatus. When I recently sat on a panel with a representative of Facebook, he admitted that he hadn’t used the site for years because he was concerned with protecting himself against invasive forces.

We need to constantly recall this ideological indifference to privacy, because there should be nothing shocking about the carelessness revealed in the Cambridge Analytica episode. Facebook apparently had no qualms about handing over access to your data to the charlatans working on behalf Cambridge Analytica—expending nary a moment’s time vetting them or worrying about whatever ulterior motives they might have had for collecting so much sensitive information. This wasn’t an isolated incident. Facebook gave away access to data harvesters as part of a devil’s bargain with third-party app developers. The company needed relationships with these developers, because their applications lured users to spend ever more time on Facebook. As my colleague Alexis Madrigal has written, Facebook maintained lax standards for the harvest of data, even in the face of critics who stridently voiced concerns.

Mark Zuckerberg might believe that world is better without privacy. But we can finally see the costs of his vision. Our intimate information was widely available to malicious individuals, who hope to manipulate our political opinions, our intellectual habits, and our patterns of consumption; it was easily available to the proprietors of Cambridge Analytica. Facebook turned data—which amounts to an X-ray of the inner self—into a commodity traded without our knowledge.