Among some skeptics, however, the profit McNamee has accrued from the technology that he now urges us to renounce makes him difficult to trust. One view of McNamee is that he has the gravitas of a man willing to admit that he was wrong. (“Shame on me,” he told one interviewer.) Another is that, having successfully ridden one wave, he is trying to ride another.

Earlier this year, I met McNamee for breakfast in Baltimore, where he was speaking to the staff of his former employer T. Rowe Price. In 2011, the company had invested a hundred and ninety million dollars in Facebook. “A lot of people are mad at me,” McNamee said, in a hotel on the waterfront. On his speaking circuit, he wears baggy suits, clunky black shoes, and round glasses. Before his book tour, he trimmed his shoulder-length curls. At the hotel’s restaurant, a hostess greeted us and politely asked for McNamee’s name.

“Why do you need my name?” he barked. The woman stuttered a reply, but McNamee cut her off. “Can we just get a table?”

He turned to me with a smirk. “Privacy!” he stage-whispered.

“I shouldn’t tell you this, but we offer the flu shot.” Facebook

Twitter

Email

Shopping Cartoon by Trevor Spaulding

McNamee is not a kombucha kind of Californian. He ordered a Diet Coke with his eggs and toast. As we ate, conversation veered from the civil-rights movement, which he says inspired his tech activism, to the number of Grateful Dead shows he attended before Jerry Garcia died (two hundred). Describing the arc of his career, McNamee attributed his business success mainly to “dumb luck.” Talk turned to Bono, whom he met through Sandberg in 2001, and with whom he co-founded Elevation Partners. “Bono said to me, more than once, ‘Your superpower is you’re not motivated by money,’ ” McNamee told me. “That’s the only reason I could do this.”

McNamee rattles off a frighteningly long list of things that he believes have been “Zucked”: “your vote,” “your rights,” “your privacy,” “your life,” “everything.” So far, the public is less alarmed. A recent Pew Research Center poll found that around half of Americans think that the tech industry is having a positive impact on society. (However, this view is on the decline: in 2015, seven in ten thought so.) Earlier this year, Google and Amazon came in second and third in a survey of millennials’ favorite brands. In general, people are more concerned about the behavior of banks and pharmaceutical companies, and most Americans have yet to meaningfully change their habits as tech consumers. McNamee’s message resonates most with a few relatively insular groups of worried citizens: parents who monitor screen time, socialists who decry West Coast inequality, academics who study algorithmic bias.

At this year’s Truth About Tech conference, held in April, at Georgetown University, I found McNamee slumped in a chair clutching a Diet Coke. “This is my fourteenth city in fourteen days,” he said. Jim Steyer—brother of Tom Steyer, the hedge-fund billionaire turned environmentalist and Presidential candidate—arrived and embraced McNamee. Steyer, who has a blond mane and a California vibe, heads the kids-and-tech advocacy group Common Sense Media. (In one of its recent P.S.A.s, featuring the Muppets, Cookie Monster eats a smartphone.) “What Roger is doing is so inspiring!” Steyer told me.

After listening to a roster of high-powered speakers—the Massachusetts senator Ed Markey, commissioners of the F.T.C. and the F.C.C., and the attorney general of Washington, D.C.—McNamee descended to a basement room where Peter Lord, a vice-president at the software company Oracle, which is worth nearly two hundred billion dollars, had the innards of an Android phone splayed out on a table. McNamee told me, theatrically, “You can stay, but this is off the record.” Lord regarded me sternly. (I later found most of what Lord discussed in a YouTube video of a talk he gave last year.) A tangle of wires led from the disassembled Android to a laptop, where data from the phone’s sensors appeared, updating each second. This amount of data, Lord explained, gesturing at the screen clogged with numbers, was routinely collected on each of Google Android’s approximately two billion users.

A technician picked up a small black component and waved it in the air. The numbers on the screen danced accordingly: this was the phone’s barometric-pressure sensor, sensitive to changes in elevation. Androids are commonly equipped with a gyroscope, an accelerometer, and a magnetic-field detector; their sensors can calculate heart rate and count steps. This constant flow of information allows your phone to track whether you’re sleeping or awake; whether you’re driving, walking, jogging, or biking; whether you’re in the Starbucks on the ground floor or the lawyer’s office on the tenth. Lord delivered a TED-like slide presentation, which included creepy quotes from Eric Schmidt, the former Google chairman: “We can more or less guess what you’re thinking about.”

For Oracle, the privacy wars have provided an opportunity to stand up for users’ interests while also advancing its own—in particular, by dramatizing the vulnerabilities of its rivals. If Google is broken up, Oracle is better positioned to thrive. During the past two years, Oracle has given the same presentation that McNamee and I received to lawmakers and regulators, who, Lord said, were “clearly frustrated” by what they learned.

All modern smartphones—including iPhones—contain hardware that monitors users’ activities and locations. But McNamee and many experts argue that Androids are unique in the extent to which they collect and retain user information. Much of this data is collected even when a phone is off-line, then uploaded to Google’s servers and integrated into an archive that includes your search, Gmail, and Google Docs history. The Android platform finds information in your apps and your online activity, and often makes this information available to third parties, like advertisers. A user agreement also gives Google Assistant the right to record conversations that occur within earshot of the device’s microphone.

Using digital profiles to predict and influence our behavior is at the heart of Google’s and Facebook’s business models. In “The Age of Surveillance Capitalism,” published earlier this year, Shoshana Zuboff, an emerita professor at Harvard Business School, warns of a “rogue mutation of capitalism,” in which tech behemoths surveil humans, and eventually control them. McNamee speaks often about surveillance capitalism, and credits Zuboff with informing his views and with bringing academic clout to the cause of Silicon Valley reformists. Like Zuboff, he uses phrases such as “behavioral modification,” and he speaks of Google Street View and the Stasi in the same breath. McNamee was alarmed by reports, in early November, of Google’s partnership with Ascension, a nonprofit health system that has access to millions of patient profiles—a development that, he said, “should trouble everybody.”

It’s notable that the dust jacket of McNamee’s book attacking Facebook includes blurbs from three of the Valley’s biggest names: Marc Benioff (a co-C.E.O. of Salesforce), Bill Joy (a co-founder of Sun Microsystems), and Vint Cerf (currently Google’s “chief Internet evangelist,” who is often referred to as the “father of the Internet”). Rivalries in Silicon Valley once revolved around technological prowess, consumer allegiance, and profitability. Now competition is for moral superiority, a fight that McNamee has found himself in the middle of.

McNamee sees his defection from Silicon Valley as nothing more than a return to his roots—an identity that mixes camp and sincerity. When I asked him to say more about his value system, he referred me to “Get Together,” a nineteen-sixties Youngbloods anthem. (“Come on people, now / smile on your brother / Everybody get together, / try to love one another right now.”) McNamee’s father, Daniel, was an investment banker and the president of the Albany chapter of the Urban League, a civil-rights organization. His mother, Barbara, was an active feminist in the sixties. At the age of twelve, McNamee became an anti-Vietnam War activist, volunteering for Eugene McCarthy’s Presidential campaign; in high school, he backed George McGovern. In protest of the Iraq War and other policies during the George W. Bush Administration, he refused to cut his hair. When President Obama was inaugurated, he celebrated with a trip to the barber.