Facebook's lawyer says "there is no privacy", referring to the challenges of Zuckerberg's pivot

June 2, 2019, 14:55 UTC

By Ben Popken

A Facebook lawyer said Wednesday that its users did not expect privacy when they were using the social network, asking a judge to withdraw from the Cambridge scandal lawsuit Analytica.

"There is no violation of privacy at all because there is none" on Facebook or any other social networking site, said the company's lawyer, Orin Snyder, to Judge Vince Chhabria.

It may be a surprise to those who have followed the pivot of the private life of CEO Mark Zuckerberg in recent months. He even wrote a manifesto for a "privacy-focused view" of social media in March, claiming that the future of communication was based on encrypted private services.

But his court lawyer's reasoning picks up what the company and Zuckerberg had previously publicly and privately declared in recent years – and explains how the company has built an online advertising business that can now only compete with Google.

While some privacy advocates have welcomed some of the changes to Facebook, such as encrypted messaging, have been welcomed, but others fear Zuckerberg's "privacy vision" the company: the targeted advertising on the data.

The company's internal emails from 2011 to 2015, disclosed as part of a lawsuit brought by a developer of photo applications against Facebook and previously made the subject of a NBC News report, point out the great diversity of ways initially envisioned by the company to monetize the data of its users – with privacy concerns rarely mentioned. At the center of these discussions was the kind of developers who would end up putting Facebook in the middle of the Cambridge Analytica scandal, in which an app connected to Facebook could collect information from millions of people.

Some of the first ideas from Facebook to take advantage of his data focused on this type of applications, Zuckerberg even allowing you to guess just how valuable a single person could be for external developers.

"~ 0.10 USD / user each year," he wrote in 2012. What "could even be too low," he added.

A Facebook spokesperson responded to a request for comment by sharing a link to a Facebook article where Zuckerberg wrote: "We have never sold any data to anyone." The spokesperson also refers to the company's previous statements, calling the emails split "cherrypicked" in the context of a lawsuit.

"The development platform is free for developers," reads the statement. "We have explored many ways to create a sustainable business. We finally opted for a model whereby developers did not need to buy advertising to access APIs. "

E-mails provide a rare glimpse into how Zuckerberg and Facebook executives have thought about creating a profitable business from user data.

Among them, Zuckerberg has launched the idea of ​​turning Facebook into a kind of "information bank" in which developers would accumulate a debt to Facebook based on the amount of data available. user they accessed, which would be paid by the purchase of ads.

He also suggested inventing a mandate that developers "must update their data and update their data every month." Whenever they "update" their data, Facebook could charge them for the amount of data they accessed.

According to an email, even the degree of proximity between different users had monetary potential for marketers. Internally, Facebook has called this metric the "coefficient".

Antonio García Martínez, Director of Ad Exchange on Facebook from 2011 to 2013, said the e-mails reflected the company's efforts to examine various ideas in the development of its business.

He added that e-mails may seem offensive to strangers but should be viewed in context.

"A call was made to" give us all your crazy ideas, "he said." The company stumbled in the dark trying to launch and monetize the product at the same time. "

"It's every conversation that every data-driven company has," he added.

Developer billing projects have finally been abandoned in favor of something more profitable: the sale of highly targeted mobile ads derived from these user data as well as data collected from various other tools.

Ashkan Soltani, a former technical director of the Federal Trade Commission, the US government's watchdog that is expected to impose a multi-billion dollar fine on Facebook, said the e-mails reflected the spirit of the when it defined its business model.

"There is not much consideration for the ethics of consumption data," Soltani said. "The company explores to create value, or the illusion of value, by providing access to user data."