The Duplicity of Facebook When It Comes to Privacy, Facebook Is Both a Friend and an Enemy
WhatsApp's privacy policy is put under scrutiny.
A few weeks ago, I almost missed a job interview because my phone signal is intermittent. It is why I love messaging apps. I use Facebook Messenger and iMessage.
And I always prefer to use iMessage, not only that it works, I know Apple protects my privacy.
We all know how Facebook loves to play with our data.
Their history precedes them, and it is how the biggest data breach happened. And sometimes, they don’t care what we think of our data privacy. For example, Facebook decided not to notify over 530 million of its users whose personal data was lifted in a breach sometime before August 2019.
I’m not an Apple Fanboy.
I love Steve Jobs, and I love the history behind Apple. When everyone thought Apple would sink to oblivion, not only did it have a second wind, it was the phoenix rising from the ashes. Today Apple not only continues to innovate but also is our biggest ally in protecting our privacy online.
Apple is far from perfect.
I have written stories about Apple’s relationship with Hermès — In my story, Apple Introduces the Apple Hermès “Luxury” AirTag. I find it obscene, but the poor treatment by Hermès of animals they use for their luxurious bags and their line of Apple Hermès “Luxury” products goes against my core values: protecting animal rights.
WhatsApp launches a privacy campaign after “backlash.”
In a report by BBC, WhatsApp is fighting governments across the globe as the company appears to champion “data privacy” and “encryption.”
The bigger picture behind the new campaign is to cover up the mess that happened after the company announced a new privacy policy that most people believe allows WhatsApp to share more of its users' private information with its parent company, Facebook.
Facebook believes in “sharing is caring,” “we all keep it in the family,” and “profits”.
While I support WhatsApp in fighting any attempt by any government to overreach its police powers by not allowing any government access to fully encrypted messages between users, as there are other ways to fight crime and punish the guilty.
At its core, I also believe that Facebook, the parent company of WhatsApp, needs to be more transparent with using our data for profit.
We have seen how Facebook always uses “ad campaigns” to vilify its enemies. Unfortunately, one of its adversaries today is Apple.
Privacy wins as Apple releases iOS 15
In the privacy war, I am on the side of Apple. Tim Cook is known to be fighting against companies like Facebook who treats our data the way a child dips their fingers inside a cookie jar.
We believe users should have the choice over the data that is being collected about them and how it’s used. Facebook can continue to track users across apps and websites as before, App Tracking Transparency in iOS 14 will just require that they ask for your permission first. — Tim Cook’s tweet.
As Apple continues to champion privacy — What is new with iOS15:
iOS 15 introduces even more privacy controls to help protect user information. With on-device speech recognition, audio of Siri requests is now processed entirely on iPhone by default,7 and performance improves significantly. Mail Privacy Protection stops senders from learning whether an email has been opened, and hides IP addresses so senders can’t learn a user’s location or use it to build a profile on them. App Privacy Report offers an overview of how apps use the access that has been granted to location, photos, camera, microphone, and contacts in the last seven days, and which other domains are contacted. —Excerpt from the Apple Newsroom.
And Apple’s commitment to privacy isn’t only lip service, and I have written about the new feature of AI on-Device Speech Recognition.
Apple’s AI on-Device Speech solves the issue of unwanted audio recording. I know that the future is looking at how tech companies will mine audio recordings, a concern people have with Alexa, Google Nest, and Spotify. — Excerpt from Apple’s AI on-Device Speech Recognition Rests on Your Hands Not on the Cloud
Mark Zuckerberg’s on Data Privacy
You can look back at the #DeleteFacebook campaign in 2018 that happened after one of the most significant data breaches in the history of Facebook helps elected Donald Trump as US President. The Facebook–Cambridge Analytica data scandal will always be Mark Zuckerberg’s claim to being part of American political history.
Three years after, Facebook is even stronger as a company.
The man behind the campaign is no other than the guy who is the co-founder of WhatsApp, Brian Acton. He believes then and now that:
He remains skeptical about Mark Zuckerberg’s commitment to encryption, “if he wants to make it happen, he will. But he has been known to change his mind.” — Interview with Journalist Steven Levy.
Anything Facebook does should be scrutinized, as it is known to use its assets like WhatsApp to help change people’s perception of its business practices. We have to remember that advertising is the driving force of Facebook’s business and data is at the heart of everything Facebook does. To quote Sheryl Sandberg, when pressed by Brian Acton to do the ethical thing, said,
“It won’t scale.”
Final Words
Whatever Facebook's real intentions as to why it appears to champion privacy and end-to-end encryption are open to everyone’s interpretation, but we can only look back at the history of Facebook and see a much bigger and clearer picture.
In the end, Facebook is a business, a business that gives us free tools and services that make our lives, “simpler” but we know by now that in exchange for “free,” we have to give the company something, and that is a piece of our data and a lot of our privacy.