Signing up for a Facebook account, or any free online service, comes with an implicit bargain: Use it as much as you want—check your News Feed, like a status, poke a friend—and in return, the company will collect your data, and use it to serve you ads both on Facebook and around the web. But what appears to be a simple exchange has become anything but.

This is not a screed about deleting your Facebook account—although if you want to, here's how. It’s not a rant about online ads. It is an argument, though, that Facebook has been a poor steward of your data, asking more and more of you without giving you more in return—and often not even bothering to let you know. It has repeatedly failed to keep up its side of the deal, and expressed precious little interest in making good.

Big Data

By now you’ve likely heard of Cambridge Analytica, a company that provided data services to Donald Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign. More recently, it has entered the spotlight for having pilfered the data of 50 million Facebook users. Cambridge obtained that data from a researcher named Aleksandr Kogan, who developed a quiz app in 2013 that collected information from not only the 270,000 people that downloaded the app, but many of their friends, as well. When Kogan passed this information along to Cambridge, it was in violation of the social media company's terms of service.

In 2014, Facebook cut off the third-party developer access that swept tens of millions of people in that particular net. But while the company says it discovered the incident in 2015, it took until this past weekend, after the publication of two deeply reported stories from The Guardian and Observer, along with The New York Times, for Facebook both to disclose it and to suspend Cambridge and Kogan from its platform.

'They’re giving us free stuff, but I deserve to know what the bargain is.' Nuala O’Connor, CDT

And even then, Facebook lacked transparency. In announcing the suspension, the company seemingly downplayed the scope of the issue by citing that 270,000 users that downloaded Kogan’s app had been affected. It added that “friends who had their privacy settings set to allow it” were also impacted, but failed to note just how significant that impact was. And rather than substantively engage with why Facebook had not offered better safeguards against Cambridge's actions, the social media company's executives partook on a semantic debate on Twitter over whether the incident counted as a “breach.”

In response to an inquiry from WIRED, Facebook pointed to the company's Friday post about suspending Cambridge Analytica. "In 2014, after hearing feedback from the Facebook community, we made an update to ensure that each person decides what information they want to share about themselves, including their friend list," wrote deputy general counsel Paul Grewal. "Before you decide to use an app, you can review the permissions the developer is requesting and choose which information to share. You can manage or revoke those permissions at any time."

But the focus on third-party apps misses the larger issues at play. “Facebook continually pushes the envelope with regards to user privacy,” says Sam Lester, consumer privacy fellow at the Electronic Privacy Information Center. “They have data on almost every American, and they try to extract maximum value out of that data.”

Supporting evidence isn’t hard to come by; in fact, in 2011 the Federal Trade Commission imposed a legally binding consent decree against Facebook over its failure to keep its privacy promises, which critics argue has gone largely unenforced.

At the very least Facebook continues to push the boundaries of consent. In 2014, it implemented a controversial test in which it attempted to manipulate the emotions of its users through News Feed. In 2016, two years after acquiring WhatsApp, Facebook changed the encrypted chat app’s terms of service to reap the phone numbers and various analytics of users with accounts on both services, giving only a 30-day opt-out window. And if you approved its use of face-recognition technology five years ago, Facebook automatically applied that preference to a host of new face-recognition features it rolled out in December, only notifying users last month that they might want to check their settings.