Leaked Documents Reveal Facebook's Global War On Data Privacy Laws (theguardian.com)

"Facebook threatened to pull investment projects from Europe and Canada if lobbying demands from COO Sheryl Sandberg were not met," reports Business Insider, adding "Canada buckled immediately."

And that's just the beginning. The Observer reports: Facebook has targeted politicians around the world -- including the former UK chancellor, George Osborne -- promising investments and incentives while seeking to pressure them into lobbying on Facebook's behalf against data privacy legislation, an explosive new leak of internal Facebook documents has revealed. The documents, which have been seen by the Observer and Computer Weekly, reveal a secretive global lobbying operation targeting hundreds of legislators and regulators in an attempt to procure influence across the world, including in the UK, US, Canada, India, Vietnam, Argentina, Brazil, Malaysia and all 28 states of the EU...

The documents appear to emanate from a court case against Facebook by the app developer Six4Three in California, and reveal that Sandberg considered European data protection legislation a "critical" threat to the company. A memo written after the Davos economic summit in 2013 quotes Sandberg describing the "uphill battle" the company faced in Europe on the "data and privacy front" and its "critical" efforts to head off "overly prescriptive new laws...." John Naughton, a Cambridge academic and Observer writer who studies the democratic implications of digital technology, said the leak was "explosive" in the way it revealed the "vassalage" of the Irish state to the big tech companies. Ireland had welcomed the companies, he noted, but became "caught between a rock and a hard place... Its leading politicians apparently saw themselves as covert lobbyists for a data monster."

A spokesperson for Facebook said the documents were still under seal in a Californian court and it could not respond to them in any detail: "Like the other documents that were cherrypicked and released in violation of a court order last year, these by design tell one side of a story and omit important context."

Comments

This is the profit motive at work

[Mr. Dollar Ton]

Whenever it is more profitable for a company to invest in corrupting the political process instead of improving its services, it will invest in corrupting the political process.

This process is unstoppable when the added benefit of unequal cost/benefit distribution makes it expensive for the other players in the market to oppose such political "investment", and multiplies the profits of the corrupting entity many times over.

Re:This is the profit motive at work

[dryeo]

Nobody puts a gun to your head and forces you to use Facebook. It's completely voluntary.

I'm finding it harder and harder to avoid Facebook, too many things happening on it or requiring it. Sure i can and do not get involved in my community because it now all happens on Facebook, can't even post a letter to the editor in the local paper because you need a Facebook login, and so on.
As the article hints at, at some point Facebook will succeed in lobbying the government to require Facebook to access government services, unless you're willing to travel a hundred miles and find the room in the basement with the sign about beware of leopards.

The other thing with Facebook is I have to actively avoid them more and more as they're everywhere. Hidden scripts and 1 px images on unrelated web pages for example. I never agreed to their tracking me but they sure try, probably have a shadow account of me with too much info on it as I doubt that I'm 100% avoiding them.

Re:This is the profit motive at work

[Mr. Dollar Ton]

So fundamentally, this isn't a problem with companies or profit or a corrupt political process.

So, "fundamentally", how to you explain the hard facts in TFA about Facebook trying to bribe politicians into supporting anti-data harvesting legislation then? Since this is /., I will not ask if you've read TFA, but instead quote TFS for you:

FB has been promising investments and incentives while seeking to pressure them into lobbying on Facebook's behalf against data privacy legislation.

And it has not been a small thing either. It is a well-orchestrated worldwide operation: documents ... reveal a secretive global lobbying operation targeting hundreds of legislators and regulators in an attempt to procure influence across the world, including in the UK, US, Canada, India, Vietnam, Argentina, Brazil, Malaysia and all 28 states of the EU

You think this isn't a problem? You think it is easy for the average voter to confront corporate subterfuge on this scale? You must be quite ignorant of how politics works, then, because it is happening everywhere and you, the average guy, have been sidelined from the political process by corporate long before you were born.

This process is trivial to stop.

You don't say. How easy is it to stop an operation like the one described above? Please elaborate, I'm very interested to hear about it. How do you learn about it, how do you get access to the likes of the UK prime minister or MPs on equal footing with Zuckerberg. How do you get your ass to Davos, mister, where Zuckerberg flies on his private jet with his army of manipulators? Show me how you've done it.

Please show me how "trivial" it is to stop a large international corporation, which business model is abusing the lack of global oversight, from shopping for politicians willing to sell out their constituency. Show me also how "trivial" it is to block Facebook from completely spying on you while you're using the Internet on all your devices if you're not a somewhat competent sysadmin.

Equating it to corporate behavior or corrupt politics is tantamount to admitting that people are too dumb

"Equating" what, my friend? The described facts about FB trying to influence the "race to the bottom" in privacy with various forms of bribery so that they can use their other manipulative technologies to spy on users does not show that users aren't "dumb" at all. It shows how insidious and ruthless the said corporation is.

Do you think that you are as clever as the whole technical and marketing machine that is FB? You have delusions of competence, my dear. You saying you can stand your ground alone against FB is tantamount to you admitting you have no idea how easy a target you are.

Re: Facebook=Good

[r_naked]

If someone has a Facebook account at this point they are a fucking moron.

I love the rationale of: "That is the only way I can stay in touch with family and friends".

Yeah, really, then you are an even bigger moron, and you deserve everything that comes from your stupidity.

The more we learn about Facebook...

[QuietLagoon]

... the worse Facebook looks.

Re: Facebook=Good

[drinkypoo]

Without that smart meter, no suspicion, no probable cause, no warrant.

Wrong. Refusing the smart meter installation is itself suspicious. At minimum, you're untrusting and/or anti-authoritarian. Or maybe you're trying to hide your usage patterns. The same is true of a Facebook account. If you don't have one, many will take that as a suspicious sign. The fix isn't to refuse to use Facebook, it's to seek legislation to make it illegal to base decisions which will affect your life on Facebook metrics.