Dear Mark,
Fuck you. Oh, sorry, were you expecting something politer? Senators might thank for you volunteering to appear in Congress, but you helped Russian propagandists influence an election and exposed the personal data of over a billion people, so I think we're past the point of being grateful.
Still, there you were, answering questions you shouldn’t have to answer. (Not because they were stupid, but because, simply by asking a question like, “How will you protect us from terrorism,” democratic lawmakers defer essential decisions of governance to someone who built a really big relational database.) And while you didn’t seem to know much about Facebook or how it operates, you did remind me of a question I’ve been meaning to ask. It’s simple. I’d like to know how I can escape Facebook's surveillance.
I know, I know, you get this question all the time. And you have an answer: if you don’t want to be tracked, just change your privacy settings. When you say that, you don’t really mean it. If someone on Facebook opts out of tracking, you’ll still track them – you’ll just stop letting advertisers target them in creepy, ill-defined ways. But I understand that in order to run your business, you feel the need to retain personally identifying information. And that – although this surely only reveals the bankruptcy of the consent model – your users did in theory agree to your terms and conditions.
But I have a problem: I’m not on Facebook. I’ve never been on Facebook. I’ve never opted into your service. So, Mark, can you tell me: how do I opt out?
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Now I know what you’re thinking. What kind of person has never been on Facebook? I’d like to tell you it was all about privacy, but the truth is, I just had a bad feeling about it. You see, I went to Cambridge, so I was one of the first to get the chance to join what you insist on calling your “community." And almost instantly, it was clear that it turned people into wankers. (Bigger wankers. This was Cambridge, after all.) If I remember correctly, in the early days everyone was desperate to have a higher friend count. Then it was obsessive tagging in photos. Yes, even in its earliest days, your system brought out the worst in people.
It's not easy, not being on Facebook. At first, it was the parties. At a certain point, people stopped sending email invites. They just assumed you were on Facebook – and, if you weren’t, you didn’t find out. I’m 35 now, so I don’t get invited to parties, unless they’re for small children. Instead, I miss out on work, because I can’t contact people or share my articles. When you finally make journalism pivot to Facebook Groups, I’ll be completely screwed.
I considered joining many times. But every time I aired the thought, I got the same reaction: “Don’t! It’s the worst!” I wasn’t sure if I remembered this correctly, so I called a few people to check. All agreed: they hate your service, but they have to use it, because everyone else does. (One person objected. She works in your London office.) Every other social network, even Twitter, has a core of fans that genuinely wish it well. You’re the sole exception.
Then I got into tech, and privacy, and data protection, and I learned that you were throttling internet freedoms in developing countries, and letting random strangers see your users’ most intimate details, so I started becoming one of those paranoid people who uses a VPN all the time, and puts a scrap of torn-off Post-It note on their laptop camera. Just like you! But you probably knew all this about me anyway. Which brings me back to my question.
In your testimony to Congress, you said: “Anyone can turn off or opt out of any data collection for ads, whether they use our services or not.” But, as you should know, while that’s possible for someone on Facebook, for me, a non-Facebook user, it’s not.
Your illegal trackers follow me across 30 per cent of the internet, building a “shadow profile” you store in a nonanonymised format in your “Hive” analysis database. You claim to do it “for security purposes” (let me tell you, if Facebook’s security requires you to surveil the world’s population, then you have made a desert and called it peace). But reporters – and people who used to work in your advertising team – say the information is collected to improve the friend suggestions you’ll give me in case I do ever sign up. It’s one more growth hack on a whole site of them.
What can I do to stop you? I've installed tracker blockers on my browser, but, since you killed the media business, a lot of my favourite sites make me disable them. And your trackers work in the apps on my phone.
Unless I go full tin-foil hat (and it’s tempting), you’ve basically left me with one option. To opt out of Facebook’s tracking, I’m going to have to join Facebook. So yeah: fuck you. Because, of course, this is exactly your plan. Forcing people onto Facebook is what you’re all about.
Read more: Let’s answer all those questions Mark Zuckerberg couldn’t
About six months ago, I spent a day at the campus you built in Silicon Valley. I’m guessing people don’t tell you this kind of thing, but, just so you know, it’s not a pleasant place. It’s too big, for a start. Plus those posters you have everywhere make it seem like an AA meeting, only for people who’ve never been drunk. There was one at reception saying, “Silence = Death.” Right above the spot where you force people to sign a non-disclosure form to enter the building.
Anyway, after a few hours of briefings (off the record, at your team's insistence, because, you know, Silence = Death), I realised all your employees shared the same verbal tic. When they were describing a dilemma, or when they were faced with a tricky question, they referred back to the mission statement you’ve always used to explain Facebook. You did it too, in your Congressional testimony (clearly forgetting that you changed it last year). “The mission of connecting everyone around the world.”
I’d heard this so many times over the years, but this was the first time I’d truly thought about it, and suddenly I was struck by its utter emptiness. “What does it mean?” I said. “Missions have an end. That’s what a mission is: you finish it, then you’re done. So what happens when you’ve connected everyone?” Unfortunately, the moment I’d picked for my rant was the campus walking tour. (Seriously, those posters. On what level are “You’re OK” and “Forget yourself” helpful things to mount on a workplace wall?). Our very friendly and helpful guide looked taken aback. And that was when I realised: this simply wasn’t a question people asked at Facebook. No-one wondered why they were doing this connecting. They just got on with the job.
Connection isn't, in itself, a facile goal. But the kind of connection that's worth seeking is rare and complex. It takes time, commitment and self-sacrifice. In your ideology, none of this is present. The frictionless connection you seek is the kind people mean when they say “Let’s connect”. Which, in case, you didn't know, is what you say when you don’t really like someone, but you feel obliged to stay in touch. As I toured your company it was bleakly funny, as an outsider, to see totally contradictory policies justified with reference to the same glib mission. But then, I forget: you’ve never been an employee. You’ve never seen that weird way CEO statements get twisted and turned around as they flow down the chain. You probably think people do what you mean, not what you say.
Actually, it turned out I had one thing wrong: sometimes, people at Facebook do wonder about the point of all this connecting. I know that because, last month, someone leaked a 2016 memo by your colleague Andrew Bosworth. With the exception of the Social Network, it’s the best thing anyone’s ever written about Facebook. “The ugly truth,” Bosworth wrote:
“Is that we believe in connecting people so deeply that anything that allows us to connect more people more often is de facto good… That’s why all the work we do in growth is justified. All the questionable contact importing practices. All the subtle language that helps people stay searchable by friends. All of the work we do to bring more communication in. The work we will likely have to do in China some day. All of it.”
Truly, what can you refute about this? In recent interviews you’ve taken to emphasising your heavy burden of civic responsibility. You get it, you say. You want the best for everyone. I’m sure you do. But, as someone who lived through the Blair years, let me offer some advice: for people in leadership positions, intentions are far less important than actions. And, by some strange quirk of history, you are now in a leadership position for the entire world.
There is one thing Bosworth got wrong – perhaps because, as he says, he was being deliberately provocative. “The natural state of the world is not connected,” he wrote. “It is not unified. It is fragmented by borders, languages, and increasingly by different products.” The part about products is true, but the rest is not, because the world has no natural state. It is what we make it. And this is why it is so painful to observe your failure.
As you recently observed, “In a lot of ways, Facebook is more like a government than a traditional company.” True – but it’s neither legitimate nor good; it is a corrupt, despotic government, deceiving its citizens at home, even as it imposes its barren colonialism abroad. You had the opportunity to lay the foundations for a global governmental infrastructure. Instead, you charged ahead with your self-appointed “mission”, never wondering how it could go wrong.
It’s not too late. You can change. You could say, “We’re here to provide a dull but essential service. To that end, we’re going to ban targeted advertising on any personal traits.” You could voluntarily divest yourself of Instagram and WhatsApp. You could leave Facebook to the public in your will.
But at this point, I’ve given up expecting anything from you. My only hope is that you can be compelled to obey the law. Which reminds me: delete my data. Stop connecting with me. Stop connecting me to anyone. Just. Stop.
Kind regards,
Rowland
This article was originally published by WIRED UK