Facebook hires three of its biggest privacy critics

For years, critics Since the Cambridge Analytica scandal until this week's revelation that Facebook has paid people – even minors – to allow it to spy on all their online activities, possibly including their encrypted private messages. Which makes it potentially a big problem, because in recent weeks, the company has quietly hired three prominent privacy advocates, all of them virulent critics, apparently to help the ship lift the bar.

In December, Facebook hired Nathan White as part of a nonprofit digital rights initiative, Access Now, and badigned him the role of Privacy Policy Manager. On Tuesday of this week, lawyers Nate Cardozo of the Electronic Frontier Foundation privacy watchdog group and Robyn Greene of the New America Open Technology Institute announced that they would also visit Facebook. Cardozo will be the manager of WhatsApp's privacy policy, while Greene will be Facebook's new privacy policy manager for law enforcement and data protection.

These three people are lions in the world of data privacy. (WIRED interviewed the three people about various reports on privacy breaches.) And they were particularly critical of Facebook. By integrating them internally, Facebook sends the message that it gives real decision-making power to people who understand very well how the social media site and its family of applications violate the privacy of its users. The open question is whether Facebook will really listen.

The advocates of privacy have so far aroused a note of cautious optimism. "Nate, Robyn and Nathan know the challenges, and they will not go to Facebook if they do not see a real opportunity to make a meaningful difference – they will all try to make it fast and break everything." benefit of privacy, "said Jennifer Granick, privacy expert and ACLU lawyer, in an email to WIRED. "It remains to be seen if they will be able to act effectively within what will become a big bureaucracy that earns money by knowing a lot about us."

Jen King, director of privacy at the Internet Center and the Stanford Society, thinks Facebook may be a sign ready to take privacy seriously. "It's possible that Facebook has finally received the memo and is really trying to change things," King told WIRED. She also noted, however, that Facebook had decided to reinforce its privacy information quite late in the game, especially since its irresponsible treatment of user data had led to a consent decree from the Federal Trade Commission up to In 2011. The FTC is currently investigating allegations that Facebook has since broken these promises. But with increased scrutiny and greater regulatory power in Europe and elsewhere, Facebook has virtually no choice but to embark on the program.

According to a skeptical point of view, Facebook would have hired in part to silence three critics, and Facebook certainly deserved his skepticism. But those familiar with the trio claim that they adhered in good faith and would leave if they were unable to make positive changes from within.

"Nate, Robyn, and Nathan … are people of deep conviction," said David O. Brien, badistant director of privacy and security research at the Berkman Klein Center for the University of Ottawa. Internet and the Harvard society. "They also have strong moral compbads.I must think that they would not have accepted these roles on Facebook without being badured that their contributions would be taken seriously."

In the past, for example, Cardozo called Facebook "goose bumps", adding that "its business model depends on our collective confusion and apathy for privacy." It's wrong, both ethically and legally ". For years, he worked on EFF's annual report on the ranking of tech companies on how they protect users' privacy, which often gave WhatsApp and Facebook a bad rating. In December, Cardozo's colleagues at EFF concluded: "Facebook has never earned your trust."

"If you know me, you'll know it's not a gesture I would make lightly," Cardozo wrote in a Facebook message announcing his new job. "After privacy beat Facebook over the past year, I was skeptical too. However, the privacy team I'm part of knows me well and knows exactly what I think about technical policy, privacy and encrypted messaging. And that's what they want to manage privacy at WhatsApp. "

In addition, Facebook will persist with or without employees focused on privacy. This makes the strategy more acceptable "if you can not beat them, join them". "The hiring of a few people does not change the culture, especially in an organization that has become as vast and as vast as Facebook," said O. Brien. "I see this as a sign that Facebook is at least interested in exploring the possibilities for change."

It is also hoped that White, Cardozo and Greene will not only enhance Facebook's privacy credibility, but also open meaningful conversations between their old worlds of advocacy and Facebook leaders.

And the change happens. After years of keeping WhatsApp, Facebook and Instagram relatively separate, Zuckerberg has big plans to unify the messaging components of these platforms so that users can communicate with each other. It will be a big test for WhatsApp, and therefore for Cardozo. WhatsApp has full end-to-end encryption by default since 2016, and Cardozo will be responsible for ensuring that encryption is not compromised by the combination of services.

It will be very difficult to know from the outside if the bet of Cardozo, White and Greene on Facebook is profitable. "Once people have gotten inside, it's hard for them to speak in public," says King.

After initially agreeing to talk to WIRED for this story, Cardozo declined after Facebook's communications team got involved. Greene and White did not respond to requests for comment. WIRED solicited comments from Facebook and will update this story if we heard it. In his announcement on TwitterGreene called the Facebook team the protection of incredible privacy. In his statement, Cardozo spoke of the "huge challenge" that the job posed. That could be an understatement.

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