The worst of surveillance capitalism
I have never written about Facebook before, and yet this company represents the worst in the field of advertising monitoring. The consequences of its domination are serious:
- Addictions: Facebook product teams have the ultimate goal of growing engagement. The more time you spend on its applications (Facebook, Instagram, Messenger, WhatsApp), the better you will be “monetized”.
- Radicalization: Extreme content provokes a reaction, it encourages engagement on the platform. As a result, Facebook's algorithms highlight extreme content and misinformation. Facebook is an opportunity for conspiracy theorists, fanatics and the far right, which endangers democracy in many countries.
- Censors: Facebook and Instagram are almost essential for anyone wishing to inform or alert. But the moderation rules are arbitrary and the appeals complicated. Moderators are lacking in some countries, do not understand cultural subtleties well. Many members of civil society and activists are censored.
- Trauma for moderators: These are contract workers, little regarded and poorly paid, confronted with horrors on a daily basis. They often remain traumatized for a long time.
- A company worthy of 1984: with its partner Google, Facebook has a founding role in the installation of generalized surveillance in our societies, undermining democracy.
The very provocative but honest memo 'The Ugly', written in 2016 by one of Facebook's executives, sums up the company culture well: “Growth at any cost”. Here is an excerpt:
So we connect more people That can be bad if they make it negative. Maybe it costs a life by exposing someone to bullies. Maybe someone dies in a terrorist attack coordinated on our tools. And still we connect people.
The ugly truth is that we believe in connecting people so deeply that anything that allows us to connect more people more often is de facto good. It is perhaps the only area where the metrics do tell the true story as far as we are concerned.
And at the heart of Facebook's model is the abusive exploitation of your personal data. Facebook's disregard for its users' privacy is widely documented on the web today. But it's rare to find a story tracing the erosion of your privacy by Facebook, compared with the state of the competition.
Dina Srinivasan is a researcher working on these subjects, at the intersection of "antitrust" and "privacy", I had already had the opportunity to talk about her work in the article "The dominance of Google's advertising markets“I am going to start here from his thesis.”The Antitrust Case Against Facebook" to describe how Facebook was able to impose its advertising surveillance on the web and applications, despite users' strong preference for respecting their privacy.
Originally, respect for privacy was a strength of Facebook
It's hard to remember today, but initially the social media market was very competitive. In 2006, the most used social network was MySpace. But Facebook was also facing many other social networks like Bebo, Hi5, Friendster or Orkut (owned by Google). How to differentiate yourself in a competitive market where the product is “free”? By quality, and the level of privacy protection has quickly become an important point of differentiation.
So in 2006, MySpace was the leader. But he was much criticized in the media, accused of encouraging sexual harassment, suicides or murders (some articles from the time here, there or even there). The reason? The excessive openness of communication on MySpace, and the lack of consideration for the privacy of its users.
Facebook therefore had an avenue to differentiate itself, which it did:
- MySpace was open to everyone, Facebook was initially reserved for students, who could provide a university email address (in ".edu").
- By default, MySpace user profiles were open to everyone. In the early days of Facebook, only friends and students from the same university could view each other's profiles.
- Facebook quickly gave a lot of control to its users, which MySpace did not allow: choice of opening or closing one's profile to friends, friends of friends, students at the same university. But also the possibility of being visible or not on its search engine, as well as granular controls on contact information such as telephone number.
Also, Facebook very quickly hired a privacy manager. Its privacy policy was short and very clear, with only 950 words. In particular, we can read:
Use of Cookies
A cookie is a piece of data stored on the user's computer tied to information about the user. We use session ID cookies to confirm that users are logged in. These cookies terminate once the users close the browser. We do not and will not use cookies to collect private information from any user.
The private network logic, the control given to users as well as the short confidentiality policy were differentiating elements compared to other social networks such as MySpace. Even if other factors may have played a role (solid technical base, initial elitism, more refined user interface, etc.), the better respect for privacy played a central role in the development of Facebook.
Beacon, the first (failed) attempt at web surveillance
In 2007, Facebook became the new fashionable social network (and I opened my account). In November, he launched Beacon, a transparent advertising monitoring initiative outside of Facebook. At launch, The New York Times is one of the partners. If I read an article from the New York Times, Facebook then offers me via a pop-up to share my reading with my friends. Facebook Beacon also allows you to share purchases, music listened to, films watched, etc.:
Facebook Beacon is watching you, but you are informed.
The presence of these new Facebook trackers allows it to monitor the behavior of users on third-party sites (via a cookie), even if they decline to share their activities. Faced with the outcry caused by Beacon, Facebook nevertheless denies monitoring users when they refuse to share. Here is an extract from the interview with the then Vice President of Marketing & Operations at the New York Times :
Q. If I buy tickets on Fandango, and decline to publish the purchase to my friends on Facebook, does Facebook still receive the information about my purchase?
A. “Absolutely not. One of the things we are still trying to do is dispel a lot of misinformation that is being propagated unnecessarily.”
Statement obviously denied a few hours later by a researcher. With Beacon trackers, Facebook also monitors users who have logged out, as well as people who do not have a Facebook account. This is a first violation of privacy for Facebook, in contradiction with its confidentiality policy which then only indicates using cookies.to confirm that users are logged in", and "these cookies terminate once the users close the browser".
Facebook quickly faced numerous protests, petitions and even lawsuits. Several participants in the Beacon program decide to withdraw. Other social networks are also taking advantage of this scandal to criticize Facebook and improve the management of privacy on their platforms. At the beginning of December 2007, Mark Zuckerberg apologizes (for a history of Zuckerberg's apology, here is a good article) and announces an option toOpt-out. The option hidden in the settings still does not meet user requirements, Facebook will close Beacon less than 1 year later.
This rapid withdrawal is proof of a still competitive market. Facebook is under pressure from competing social networks. Also, in order to restore trust already betrayed, Facebook announcement in 2009 that any changes to the privacy policy will now be subject to a vote.
The Like button, an ideal Trojan horse
Facebook is consistent in its ideas, it learns from its mistakes and in April 2010, it introduces the Like button during its annual developer conference. For publishers, this is an opportunity to benefit from easy distribution of their articles on Facebook, and therefore attract new readers. And quickly it was a success: in the first weeks, more than 50,000 sites installed the like button, including famous publishers such as CNN, the New York Times, The Wall Street Journal and Slate.
But like with Beacon, the Like button communicates with Facebook's servers to display on your screen. Facebook can thus monitor your browsing, again in contradiction with its privacy policy. CNET thus cites the FAQ of the time :
No data is shared about you when you see a social plug-in on an external website.
Unlike Beacon, Facebook indicates that this product will not be used for commercial surveillance purposes. 2 reasons:
- Facebook still remembers the Beacon scandal, and wants to avoid a new scandal.
- He must convince publishers, competitors in the advertising market, to install these Like buttons. Theoretically, it could thus sell the Wall Street Journal's audience to advertisers more cheaply, directly on Facebook.
A researcher was able to detail the leak of personal data via the Like button (Facebook Tracks and Traces Everyone: Like This!) from November 2010. Via cookies that it installs even if you do not click on the Like button, the social network recovers your identity, the URL of the page viewed as well as the title of the article or the name of the product. Here too, monitoring takes place even if you do not have a Facebook account. But unlike Beacon, no Facebook pop-up asking you to share the article you're reading or the purchase you've just made: surveillance is now invisible.
How is Facebook reacting to these new revelations? The technical director at the time declared that these cookies are not used by Facebook to monitor users but to protect user accounts from cyber attacks. Concerning the monitoring of users who do not have an account, this would be a bug which has since been corrected (false). The Wall Street Journal reports in its May 2011 investigation that Like buttons made it possible to monitor you on more than a third of the 1000 most visited websites in the world, and on more than a million websites. Faced with such figures, we begin to realize the extent of generalized surveillance.
In September 2011, Facebook is accused of continuing to monitor users even after they log out. Facebook should delete cookies when a user logs out and in particular the user ID, it does not do so, and tries to deceive its audience:
Facebook does not track users across the web. Instead, we use cookies on social plugins to personalize content (e.g. show you what your friends liked), to help maintain and improve what we do (e.g. measure click-through rate), or for safety and security (e.g. keeping underage kids from trying to sign up with a different age). No information we receive when you see a social plugin is used to target ads, we delete or anonymize this information within 90 days, and we never sell your information.
Specific to logged-out cookies, they are used for safety and protection, including identifying spammers and phishers, detecting when somebody unauthorized is trying to access your account, helping you get back into your account if you get hacked, disabling registration for underage people who try to re-register with a different birth date, powering account security features such as second factor login approvals and notification, and identifying shared computers to discourage the use of “Keep me logged in.”
If we think about the best way for Facebook to impose its surveillance capitalism, it must first convince publishers to install its trackers. Since transparency was not successful (Beacon was presented as a commercial tool), Facebook preferred to operate in a disguised manner (declaring that the Like button would not be used for advertising surveillance).
In December 2012, the Wall Street Journal returned to its investigation to indicate that Like buttons are now found on 2/3 of the top 1000 sites, Facebook further responds that it only uses information from Like buttons for security and to fix bugs. But the dishonesty is there. In February 2011, Facebook filed a patent to monitor users outside its own site and offer targeted advertising based on these profiles:
The present disclosure relates generally to social network systems and other websites in which users can form connections with other users, and in particular, to tracking activities of users of social network systems on other domains to, for example, analyze, target, or gauge the effectiveness of advertisements (ads) rendered in conjunction with social network systems.
Before using data collection from Like buttons for ad monitoring, Facebook still had to clear one last hurdle: the fact that any privacy policy changes had to be put to a vote. Here's how Facebook did it:
- In late 2012, with over a billion users and a successful IPO, Facebook proposed a vote on removing future referendums regarding its privacy policy.
- 88% of users voted against, but Facebook arguing that only 589,000 people had voted (a clause indicated that at least 30% of users had to vote), it could rely on the will of the participants and abolish the referendums.
Many users later complained that they had not been informed of this vote, having received no notification or email. Facebook clearly didn't want you to vote.
In June 2014, Facebook decided to activate advertising monitoring based on Like buttons (and all the other plugins it provides to publishers: Facebook Login, the Facebook pixel, the SDK for applications, etc.). The title of the article announcing the update is a model of Newspeak: Making Ads Better and Giving People More Control Over the Ads They See.
After spending 7 years promising not to use the data collected by its plugins for advertising surveillance, Facebook is reneging on its promises. For what ? The competition has been crushed (MySpace and Orkut have closed, Google+ has proven to be a failure) and even if the quality of Facebook is greatly degraded by this massive invasion of their privacy, users no longer have viable alternatives. Facebook can now over-exploit your personal data for its greatest benefit.
In 2018, even WhatsApp co-founder advises deleting Facebook.
With WhatsApp, Facebook reproduces the same strategy
WhatsApp was created in 2009 and very quickly, the protection of privacy is a strong focus of the application :
So first of all, let's set the record straight. We have not, we do not and we will not ever sell your personal information to anyone. Period. End of story. Hopefully this clears things up.
In 2012, when WhatsApp co-founder Jan Koum wrote the post "Why we don't sell advertising", the discourse on advertising is strong:
Advertising is not just an aesthetic nuisance, an insult to your intelligence and an interruption to your train of thoughts. At every advertising company, a significant portion of their engineering team spends their days refining data mining, improving code to collect all your personal data, improve the servers that hold all the data and make sure everything is recorded, gathered, chopped, packaged and sent... In the end, the result of all this is a slightly different advertising banner in your browser or mobile phone screen.
Here is another passage from the same post, dealing with the collection of personal data:
At WhatsApp, our engineers spend all their time fixing bugs, adding new features, and combing through everything to deliver rich, affordable, and reliable messaging for every phone around the world. This is our product and our passion. Your data doesn't even come into play. We simply don't care.
At the time, WhatsApp had a very good reputation. The application was indeed appreciated for its simplicity, its reliability, but also for its positioning on advertising and personal data. As with Facebook in its early days, privacy protection is a competitive advantage for WhatsApp, which allows it to gain market share (on Facebook Messenger or Google Hangouts for example).
Only here, in 2014 WhatsApp sold its application to Facebook for 22 billion dollars. Given Facebook's history, we can already fear the worst. Jan Koum nevertheless writes on the WhatsApp blog :
Here's what will change for you, our users: nothing.
WhatsApp will remain autonomous and operate independently. You can continue to benefit from the service at lower costs. You can continue to use WhatsApp anywhere around the world or with any Smartphones you use. And you can always count on the fact that there will be absolutely no advertising to interrupt your communication. There would have been no partnership between our two companies if we had had to compromise on our fundamental principles which make up the identity of our company, our vision and our product.
And in fact, WhatsApp goes back on its word and decides to share your personal data with Facebook from 2016 :
But by coordinating more with Facebook, we'll be able to do things like track basic metrics about how often people use our services and improve the fight against spam on WhatsApp. And by connecting your phone number with Facebook systems, the latter can offer you better friend suggestions and show you more relevant ads if you have a Facebook account. For example, you might see an ad from a company you've worked with before instead of seeing one from a company you've never heard of.
In order to better understand the scope of this modification, it is appropriate to remove ourselves from WhatsApp's communication. The EFF details the data now shared with Facebook : telephone number, address book and usage data (when you use WhatsApp, with whom you communicate, on which device, your IP address, etc.). This metadata is extremely valuable for Facebook, which even if it does not have access to the content of your WhatsApp conversations (end-to-end encrypted), collects the most important information.
At the time, WhatsApp only gave existing users a 30-day opt-out (via this “Dark Pattern”). New users will not have this choice. And again, the opt-out does not stop the sharing of information, only prevents Facebook from using your WhatsApp information for targeted advertising or the improvement of its products (friend suggestion). Let's reread the EFF on this:
Note that your WhatsApp information will still be passed to Facebook for other purposes such as “improving infrastructure and delivery systems, understanding how [Facebook and WhatsApp] services...are used, securing systems, and fighting spam, abuse, or infringement activities." Changing your settings does ensure, however, that Facebook will not use your WhatsApp data to suggest friends or serve ads.
In Europe, this data sharing goes badly. Germany refuses data sharing, then the European data protection authorities “urgently” request to stop sharing personal data. The UK CNIL requests then pause the data synchronization. Finally the CNIL gives formal notice WhatsApp to no longer transmit WhatsApp business intelligence data to Facebook. Meanwhile, the European Commission says Facebook provided misleading information when buying WhatsApp and imposes a fine on him of 110 million euros:
Facebook told the Commission that it would not be able to automatically and reliably link the user accounts of the two companies
These episodes are very well summarized in Killian Kemps' blog post, "Does WhatsApp transfer data to Facebook?". This post asks a simple question: has WhatsApp really stopped sharing your personal data with Facebook following these complaints in the European Union? Unfortunately no, even if the answer is not easy to find.
This is what the whatsapp privacy policy for residents of the European Union (updated April 2018):
How we work with other Facebook entities
We are part of the Facebook entities. As a member of the Facebook entities, WhatsApp receives information from Facebook entities and also transmits information to them. We may use the information they send to us, and they may use the information we send to them, to help us operate, provide, improve, understand, personalize, support and market our Services and their offerings [...].
By delving deeper into the question via the article "How we work with Facebook entities", we understand that the exchanges of personal data between WhatsApp and Facebook are very numerous. One point however, without the action of the European Commission, Facebook would go even further in the processing of your personal data:
We do not share data in order to improve Facebook products on the platform and to provide better advertising experiences on Facebook.
Today, Facebook does not use your WhatsApp account information to improve your experience with Facebook products or to provide you with more targeted Facebook ads on its platform. This is the result of discussions with the Irish Data Protection Commissioner and other data protection authorities in Europe. We're always looking for new ways to improve your experience with WhatsApp and the Facebook Business Products you use. If in the future we decide to share such data with the Facebook Entities for this purpose, we will first enter into an agreement with the Irish Data Protection Commissioner to establish a mechanism that allows such use. We will inform you of new experiences made available to you and our practices regarding the use of your data.
And indeed, if you are not a resident of the European Union, Facebook does not deprive you of anything :
Facebook and other entities in the Facebook family may also use information we provide to improve your experiences within their services, such as making product suggestions (e.g. from friends, connections or interesting content) and displaying relevant offers and advertisements.
Since the beginning of January, the latest update of WhatsApp's terms of use goes wrong. The date of application of the new conditions of use has been postponed: initially scheduled for February 8, it will take place on May 15, time for WhatsApprefine your communication.
If the sharing of your personal data with Facebook has already been in effect for almost 5 years, this update will allow Facebook to go further :
- Sharing your WhatsApp transactional data with the "Facebook Shops".
- Sharing your communications with businesses, via a communications hosting service offered by Facebook.
This hosting service is a first breach of the end-to-end encryption because these communications will not be encrypted by the host (one of the 2 “ends” of encryption). This is how WhatsApp drowns the fish :
WhatsApp considers chats with businesses using the WhatsApp Business app or managing and storing customer messages themselves to be end-to-end encrypted. Once the message is received, it will be subject to the company's own privacy practices. The company can allow a certain number of employees, or even other service providers, to process the message and respond to it.
Some businesses may choose to store and respond to customer messages securely through WhatsApp's parent company, Facebook. You can always contact companies to learn more about their privacy practices.
For convenience, the vast majority of companies will undoubtedly choose the Facebook hosting solution. The content of your discussions with companies will therefore be visible to the “host” Facebook and subject to its privacy practices.
Last argument in favor of WhatsApp therefore (especially if we compare to Telegram), your personal messages remain protected by end-to-end encryption, by default :
The privacy and security of your personal messages and calls remains unchanged. They are protected by end-to-end encryption and neither WhatsApp nor Facebook can read or listen to them. We will never weaken this security and we feature this information in every chat so you can be aware of our commitment.
Note that WhatsApp uses Signal's open source protocol for message encryption, a strong point:
Every WhatsApp message is protected by the same Signal encryption protocol, securing messages before they leave your device.
But for the rest of your personal data, it's open bar. How could WhatsApp betray its users to this extent? For a detailed history of WhatsApp's compromises (and resistance) to its parent company, read the excellent Forbes article "Exclusive: WhatsApp Cofounder Brian Acton Gives The Inside Story On #DeleteFacebook And Why He Left $850 Million Behind". The co-founder of WhatsApp declares in particular:
I sold my users’ privacy to a larger benefit. I made a choice and compromised. And I live with that every day.
Brian Acton left WhatsApp in September 2017 (and his friend Jan Koum in April 2018). Today he is the head of the Signal Foundation, launched in February 2018 with $50 million in seed funding from Acton. He also has an important operational role at Signal.
Facebook has since disgusted Instagram co-founders Kevin Systrom and Mike Krieger, for a story of jealousy (Instagram is fashionable, more Facebook) and growth at all costs (degrading the Instagram application to highlight the Facebook application).
A happy ending?
As we can see, WhatsApp follows the model of its parent company: it has established itself by being more respectful of privacy than its competitors. Bought by Facebook and in a dominant position, it betrays your trust by gradually eroding your privacy.
Will he get away with it? It will depend on our collective actions. For my part, the task is even more difficult than with Facebook and Instagram (accounts that I was able to close some time ago). I was able to migrate some conversations and groups to Signal, but I'm going to have to convince a lot of people before I hope to close my WhatsApp account.
WhatsApp Privacy on the App Store.
Signal Privacy on the App Store.
However, there is reason to be optimistic in the long term. Unlike Facebook or Instagram which today have no real competitors, Telegram and Signal messaging services will give WhatsApp a hard time. And the current wave of Signal installations is great to see.
A tweet by Elon Musk can never do wrong.
We've had worse like sponsor.
