Is there really such a big leap going from working for Facebook to working for the NSA except the spying you are doing is much more direct and not surrounded is business speak?

People can (mostly) opt out of Facebook. There's no opting out of government surveillance. There's no opting out of zero days and built in backdoors and secretly modified hardware.

Opting out of using Facebook is much easier than opting out of being tracked by Facebook.

Facebook builds shadow profiles for people that don't have accounts. I have a dormant account and checked out my profile and they've linked together multiple email addresses I've never given them. Ad blocking and tracking protection aren't sufficient because retailers give data to Facebook. There are ways to delete data now, which is a welcomed improvement, but that's after it's already been collected.

With that said, I understand the larger point you're making about government surveillance. I just don't see most people being able to opt out of Facebook. Moreover, the government can compel Facebook to hand over whatever data is provided by users voluntarily, making the private/public split less than airtight.

I think OPs point is there is probably very little ethical difference between Google, Facebook, and the NSA. The people at all three probably aren't also climbing moral mountain either. Most people in tech probably have to struggle or ignore both morals and ethics, maybe not directly about their job but definitely about the companies they work for. You can't really opt out of what Google and Facebook do, because a big part of it is industry influencing and their own opt-out features are rarely comprehensive enough to be useful.

Yeah, facebook is definitely tracking everyone, whether or not they use facebook.

Remember a few years ago (maybe even 10 years now) when facebook started testing their facial recognition capabilities? You'd post a photo, and it would highlight all the faces, tell you who they were, and ask if you wanted to tag them. It likely has a photo of 99.99% of living people at this point, and has profiles on them, cross-linked with any relevant discussion people have had about them (even if they're not on facebook).

Any site that allows you to "log in with facebook" is running their analytics which tracks you across sites, and builds your "profile", and if you have a gravatar on one of those sites, there's a good chance Facebook can now associate you with any photo that has been uploaded of you, even if you just happened to be in the background.

People were writing about this stuff in the '80s; it seems like some don't realize we're already there.

There's no opting out of facebook unless you take extreme measures.

And “patriotism.”

I consider myself fairly patriotic and I'd never work for the NSA, because I can think of few things that are more antithetical to this country's (hypothetical) ideals than mass surveillance. The Patriot Act has to be the most ironically named piece of legislation in history.

I mean, I’d say there’s a big positive leap in working for the NSA rather than Facebook. (And I’m not American, so I’m an explicit target of the NSA in ways that Americans aren’t.)

Your family and friends will need to be interviewed. So overall the interview process is a bit more in-depth.

How do they determine who counts as a friend?