Everything Facebook Promised Was Negotiable
Your messages on Facebook were never yours. That’s the only honest reading of what the New York Times documented in December 2018: internal records showing that Facebook had given Netflix, Spotify, Pandora, Microsoft, Sony, Amazon, and Apple varying degrees of access to users’ private messages, contact lists, and social graphs—in some cases without users having any real awareness it was happening. Netflix and Spotify could apparently read your direct messages if you’d connected their apps to your account. Microsoft built shadow profiles from Facebook friend data on its own servers. Apple had access to phone numbers and calendar entries while publicly denying it.
Facebook’s explanation was the usual—these were integrations, the partnerships enabled features users wanted, most of it has been discontinued. The timeline conveniently ends before it becomes embarrassing to continue. The actual architecture—the fact that a social network’s supposedly private messaging system was systematically opened to third parties as a business arrangement—that part doesn’t get explained away with a press statement about deprecated APIs.
What strikes me about the Times getting this story is that their own older app was apparently in the same category. It too had accessed user data beyond what was necessary. They ran the story anyway. That’s either admirable editorial integrity or a calculated bet that the embarrassment was worth the impact. Probably both.
The standard response was to announce you’d deleted Facebook, usually on Twitter, before checking Instagram—which Facebook owns. The deletion theater was exhausting to watch. The more honest position is that we built our social lives on platforms whose business model requires treating our relationships as inventory, and we understood this was roughly true and did it anyway because the network effects made opting out feel impossible. That’s not stupidity. That’s a rational response to a bad situation with no clean exit.
WhatsApp and Instagram, both owned by Facebook, were the obvious next questions—and nobody was asking them loudly enough. If the parent company can’t handle its own platform’s data with basic discipline, there’s no reason to expect the subsidiaries to be different. They aren’t.
I don’t have clean alternatives to offer. The good, safe, widely-adopted replacement hasn’t arrived. What has arrived is a fairly complete picture of what the existing infrastructure is actually for—and it isn’t for us.