The internet lit up with a vitriolic delight this week upon hearing the news that Facebook lost almost $120 billion in a single day, equal to about one-fifth of the corporation's aggregate worth. One of the biggest single-day net value losses in market history was greeted with self-righteous cheering on the part of those who evidently care more about the comportment of a social media enterprise than that of its own governing authorities.
The irony is overwhelming.
Every single one of the 96 congressional panel members who grilled Mark Zuckerberg during the mid-April Congressional hearings regarding the ethical use of voluntarily surrendered personal information works for or with a public institution which has been illegally data mining and wire tapping American citizens for decades.
In essence, to quote Professor Peter G. Klein, "Wholly unaccountable government agenc[ies] record our... electronic communications", and they do this whether we like it or not, with or without our consent. And yet while the media remains generally silent about this, we have elected to be outraged by a private firm (beholden to a board, shareholders, investors, and customers) which has categorized and utilized the personal data that we have surrendered willingly.
Not only is this the case, but domestic intelligence agencies and investigative bureaus alike have cooperated with and used the services of Facebook to conduct investigations and accrue information related to both committed crimes and people of interest. If Facebook has violated laws related to privacy and if federal bureaus have been complicit or cooperative with this conduct to their own advantage, questions regarding federal collusion should also be raised.
It's fascinating to observe as the very same people who insist on a partial/complete surrender of privacy in exchange for security (a la the Patriot Act of 2001) condemn the use of personal information and indignantly brand it an breach of privacy. It's even more interesting when one considers that the aforementioned public outcry has been sparked by the use of personal data and information that we have CHOSEN to surrender, and not by that which is illegally garnered without our permission.
Summarily, privacy rights only matter to us when it's an accountable private corporation and not a public governing institution that's in question. We are throwing a national tantrum because we signed over personal information via a user agreement, and not because the federal government routinely contravenes our Constitutional right to privacy.
Some of the actions that Zuckerberg took were undoubtedly wrong, but here's a noteworthy fact: The Facebook founder and CEO has apologized and spent billions of dollars to rectify the issue and is working both reactively and proactively to prevent it from recurring. The federal government has neither admitted to nor apologized for identical crimes. In actuality, said crimes continue to this day. Watching the sheer irony of the federal government going after Mark Zuckerberg for privacy violations is comical in its hypocrisy.
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