Here's the context. Ad Observatory is a tool that helps FB users scrape and store the ads that get shown to them. These ads are pooled by academics in a repository that is used to analyze Facebook's failure to enforce its own policies about paid disinformation campaigns.
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FB has threatened to sue a university for maintaining this tool. They claim that they are required to do this by the FTC and as a means of protecting their users' privacy.
What the FTC ACTUALLY ordered FB to do was crack down on political disinformation. The academics that this global multibillion dollar enterprise is threatening have documented, in eye-watering detail, how badly FB is failing to live up to its legal obligations.
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(I strongly doubt that FB would be expending legal blood and treasure to shut down this project if all that it demonstrated was the company's outstanding compliance with FTC orders and its own policies)
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Most galling, though, is FB's insistence that this protects its users' privacy. That is a grotesque zuckerbergian distortion of what privacy means. Privacy isn't "no one knows about me."
That is SECRECY, not PRIVACY.
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Privacy is "I get to decide who knows what about me."
If FB users want to choose to let the world know that they are being targeted by paid political disinformation campaigns that leverage FB's ad platform, there is no privacy interest in preventing that.
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Please, don't take my word for it! Read this fantastic explainer on privacy, which contains this genuinely excellent summary: "What you share and who you share it with should be your decision."
That definition comes from our friends at (checks notes)...
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Surveillance companies assure us that they employ safeguards to ensure that their customers aren't abusing their products to engage in unlawful or unethical surveillance. And yet, inevitably, these companies abuse their tools THEMSELVES.
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It's almost as though being the kind of person who dreams of achieving incredible wealthy by spying on people makes you kind of an asshole.
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Like the people at @VerkadaHQ, "a fast-growing Silicon Valley surveillance startup" whose male employees used its own products to sexually harass their female colleagues and received the barest wrist-slaps for it.
One of the arguments for permitting monopolies is that they are "efficient." That's the logic under which Universal was allowed to acquire Comcast and NBC - the "vertical integration" would make all three companies better and we'd all reap the benefit.
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It turns out that there are DISeconomies of scale, what Brandeis called "the curse of bigness" and really, the Universal-NBC-Comcast octopus is a poster child for that curse.
Comcast has just informed its subscribers that they are at risk of losing access to "Bravo, CNBC, E!, Golf Channel, MSNBC, Olympic Channel, Oxygen, Syfy, Telemundo, Universal Kids, NBC Universo, USA Network and NBC Sports Network."
When a new president is sworn in, they gets told a lot of secret stuff - launch codes, backup plans, etc. But one of the best-kept presidential secrets is the "Enemies Briefcase," a collection of "presidential emergency action documents" (PEADs).
These aren't just revelations about the fallback plans for things like a nuclear strike - they are a meticulously maintained collection of emergency authorities that the administrative branch claims it is entitled to.
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These authorities are analyzed in legal memos that give the president to unilaterally declare an emergency "imposing martial law, suspending habeas corpus, seizing control of the internet, imposing censorship, and incarcerating so-called subversives."
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Hubbard's got deep experience, and she brings the same kind of verve to this book that Zephyr Teachout delivered in her (also excellent) (and also brilliantly titled) BREAK 'EM UP:
But Hubbard's got another thing going for her: institutional support. The Open Markets Institute operates a range of advocacy programs for angry members of the public (e.g. you), and each of Hubbard's chapters ends on ways you can engage in the policy questions she raises.
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