Why no one has made a tool to turn off Facebook oversharing
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The debate over whether Cambridge Analytica’s harvesting of tens of millions of Facebook profiles was a “breach” turns on the question of whether Cambridge Analytica did anything wrong, by Facebook’s own policies.
By default, Facebook shares your friends’ data with the apps you interact with through its “platform,” and turning that feature off requires an intricate, needlessly, deliberately complex dance with Facebook’s bewildering privacy dashboard.
Privacy advocates are publishing recipes you can follow to prevent this oversharing, but this raises the question: why not just automate the process, making a tool that autopilots your browser to undo all of Facebook’s terrible defaults? This isn’t a complex tool, and it’s exactly the kind of thing that software is great for: automating a complex, fiddly task with a robot that does it perfectly every time.
The answer is that it’s become legally terrifying to make tools like that. We can still make ad-blockers (for now), but making a tool that allows your users to modify how they interact with their technology is increasingly fraught, whether that’s a tool to force your printer to accept third-party ink, a tool to force your phone to accept third-party apps, or a tool that automates privacy-maximizing changes to your Facebook settings.
Larry Lessig taught us that our world is regulated by four forces: law (what’s legal), markets (what’s profitable), norms (what’s moral) and code (what’s technologically possible). Companies like Cambridge Analytica and Facebook get to deploy all four forces to push us to behave in ways that benefit them, but increasingly code is off the table when it comes to pushing back.
