Thread by @jason_kint

important discovery of how Facebook is a surveillance ad company posing as a consumer product company leveraging monopoly. A few comments I would like to add to this thread which clearly got a lot of eyes because yet - even today - Facebook abuses its rock-bottom expectations. /1

https://twitter.com/zamaan_qureshi/status/1381337384927830021

All of this tracking is running into friction. Facebook was forced to reluctantly add a clear history tool (joke), Apple has started blocking it in Safari along w DuckDuckGo, Brave, Firefox in extensions/apps and Apple is about to kneecap Facebook’s app tracking on iOS. 🙏🏽 /2

Facebook likes to pretend that sites intentionally share the data with Facebook. I wrote about this in WSJ in 2014 and it’s a part of the antitrust reports, German Cartel Office case etc. Truth is Facebook misled publishers. I told them this. /3 blogs.wsj.com/cmo/2014/06/20…

We also learned these embedded FB tracking pixels tracking activity are on 8+ million sites thanks to evidence produced in UK Parliamentary hearings. ht @DamianCollins As we’ve studied, users don’t expect this to be happening and mostly don’t know. /4 niemanlab.org/2018/04/jason-…

A stat also commonly not understood is only 2 major tech platforms collect a majority of their data as 3rd parties (activities happening when they’re using other services) - those two companies would be Google and Facebook. They like market to think it’s mostly 1st party data. /5

This is a comical statement by Facebook which again shows the massive gap in expectations between Facebook’s *surveillance by default* and the public - this is why we need strong laws against tracking by gatekeepers like Facebook. Their dominance leads to data abuse. /6

A couple things specific to @zamaan_qureshi’s discovery. He perfectly illustrates the antitrust harm here. Especially for people attempting to engage in their community and education. This again is why @NewYorkStateAG and German Cartel Office cases are so vital to public. /7

And @zamaan_qureshi even discovers something not entirely evident in this anticompetitive behavior and would violate spirit of GDPR if Facebook and 🇮🇪 actually cared. If you don’t want t be tracked then you can’t use Facebook for sign-on either. What a bad actor they are. /8

And @zamaan_qureshi also absolutely nails Facebook’s business and profit model. I’m really heartened to see an entire new generation that has grown up with Facebook recognizing this so clearly. I think users are also starting to connect dots to Instagram and WhatsApp, too. /9

And this final claim by Facebook, I don’t even know what to do with considering their unanswered data breaches that very much collect Likes, tracking of our global activity to real-world harms even political engineering and erosion of democracy. /10

Here is the @Newsweek report by @LaurenGiella on all of this connecting the dots how @zamaan_qureshi started out as a victim of Facebook breach and walked into their surveillance. /end newsweek.com/victim-faceboo…