But let's attack this argument on a technical level again: The data you speak of already resides in Facebook's database. There is no privacy implications of them using data, your messages, your pictures, and metadata that is already in their database or one of their children companies databases, for ads.
The only data you could question is trackers on third-party sides, but the "everyone else is doing it" argument makes it silly for Facebook to not do so as well to compete considering the reach that they have. Call that a weak excuse, but they are offering a free product in exchange for translating to money and are one of the few social startups that have actually been able to pull it off without hemorrhaging money.
The amount of press for example that Facebook has received the last 2 years on almost completely FUD topics is absolutely astounding. Cambridge Analytica was even FUD, and is still to this day misunderstood. Cambridge Analytica leaked data from your Facebook account via an exploit and phishing. This was a feature designed to give developers more opportunities. The amount of damage this has done to real legitimate apps in the Facebook ecosystem can not be understated, and since then Facebook's product quality has backpedalled considerably. All because the media spun this incorrectly, did not understand the technical details at hand, and pushed responsibility onto Facebook.
My 2 cents: We need to focus on the facts. There are real problems with privacy in society, and we are wasting so much time focusing on misunderstood problems to focus on the real ones. These are not scandals. These are weak news days.
Issues like this get all the limelight, make all the headlines, and reduce visibility to actual real life problems incl. those related to privacy. That needs to stop.
On a related note, my lawyer already knows where the money is buried, so are there any privacy implications in him giving the police a few tips? Privacy isn't just about who has my data -- it's about how my data gets used.
The use of ads to target me against my will, or to allow other people to target me against my will is a violation. Facebook does share data with other companies, but even if they didn't, there's no practical difference between a company targeting me directly based on my data and a company asking Facebook to target me based on the same data. Facebook is just acting as a proxy.
False. I've been a WhatsApp user for many years, I've never been a Facebook user. So they definitely extracted data from WhatsApp that they didn't have before.
The GDPR begs to differ. By that logic, your web hosted would also be free to take your server logs and database contents and use them for their own purposes, since it's already on their server. Would you be fine with that?
But ok, assuming your argument were right, wouldn't then the rational thing be to contribute as little data as possible to tech companies' databases? And yet all industry trends, cloud advocates, IoT providers and modern IT projects in general point in the other direction.
And that's not paranoia, it's openly something that Facebook is doing right now[0].
> In a blogpost, WhatsApp announced it would begin sharing names and phone numbers with its parent company, to allow its more than 1 billion users “to communicate with businesses that matter to you too” – like notifications from airlines, delivery services or your bank, for example.
> Facebook will also use that data to make friend suggestions and combine that data with the reams of information it has already collected so that it can tailor ads even more specifically to your interests.
If you think that Facebook isn't mining WhatsApp data for ads, you aren't paying enough attention to Facebook. I don't think they've backdoored the E2E encryption (though it wouldn't surprise me if in the future they started doing on-device keyword detection for ads, which wouldn't technically require them to insert a backdoor). But it doesn't really matter, they don't need to go that far.
> Everyone does this. Everyone will continue doing this. There is absolutely nothing morally wrong with that status quo.
This is how all of these conversations always go. Privacy advocates are paranoid crazy people, until it turns out that companies are spying on you. Then suddenly the argument is that the status quo is fine and the controls are great and everyone always knew they were being recorded, and why is everyone making a big deal about it?
If you're frustrated that people come up with crazy theories about Facebook turning on their microphones, those theories might exist because smart TVs and mobile devices already use audio to track you[1]. Every time that someone raises an alarm on a privacy violation, and people tell them they're paranoid, and then the paranoid people turn out to be right, the theories about tracking get a little bolder in response.
If advertisers want the paranoia to stop, maybe they should stop giving people reasons to be paranoid. The current state of privacy conspiracy theories is entirely, 100% the fault of the advertising industry and other mass data-collection industries and government departments.
[0]: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/aug/25/whatsapp-...
[1]: https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2015/11/beware-of-ads-th...