Facebook seems confident that its anti-privacy policies have been so successful and sustained that the company has effectively managed to “condition” its users to accept privacy abuses, and expect nothing better.
In a fit of what – if true – can only be described as brazen arrogance, a counsel for Facebook has allegedly told a US district judge that Facebook users, and those of other social platforms, are so accustomed to and accepting of the policies in question, that they simply “have no reasonable expectation of privacy.”
That would be the gist of Facebook’s representative Orin Snyder’s statement during a pretrial hearing, in an attempt to persuade Judge Vince Chhabria to throw out a lawsuit accusing the company of privacy violations in the context of the Cambridge Analytica case, Law 360 is reporting.
“There is no invasion of privacy at all, because there is no privacy,” Snyder reportedly spelled it out in as painfully direct and frank terms as you are ever likely to hear from this, or any other tech giant.
Let’s put aside here for a moment that Snyder apparently took it upon himself to speak on behalf of at least 2.3 billion of Facebook’s users around the world – because those billions may actually have authorized the behemoth to do just that, and take all their private data to third parties while at it. Nobody reads those terms of service anyway, do they – so who knows.
And let’s also put aside the burning hypocrisy of it all – considering that the line of defense Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg and other c-level executives have been trying to draw to stem the negative tide has been the promise of “a pivot to privacy.”
But for a legal representative of Facebook to say such a thing in a federal court – that there is no expectation of privacy, and that’s why no privacy lawsuit can stand – and effectively, blame the victim – surely, a skilled attorney could hone a whole new lawsuit just out of that one statement?
After all, living in a bad neighborhood and dreading the idea of being mugged or assaulted surely does not remove the acts of mugging and assault from the list of criminal offenses?
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