PRIVACY AN ANTITRUST ISSUE?

The demise of Facebook’s competition has put our data at risk[OPINION]

As Facebook has generated scandal after scandal in recent years, critics have started to wonder how we might use antitrust laws to rein in the company’s power.In MID 2000s – when Facebook was an upstart social media platform. To differentiate itself from the market leader, Myspace, Facebook publicly pledged itself to privacy. Privacy provided its competitive advantage as company promised-“We do not and will not use cookies to collect private information from any user.” When Facebook later attempted to change this bargain with users , the threat of losing its customers to its competitors forced the company to reverse course. In 2007, for example, Facebook introduced a program that recorded users’ activity on third-party sites and inserted it into the News Feed. Following public outrage and a class-action lawsuit, Facebook ended the program.“We’ve made a lot of mistakes building this feature, but we’ve made even more with how we’ve handled them,” Facebook’s chief executive, Mark Zuckerberg, wrote in a public apology.This sort of thing happened regularly for years. Facebook would try something sneaky, users would object and Facebook would back off.But then Facebook’s competition began to disappear. Facebook acquired Instagram in 2012 and WhatsApp in 2014. Later in 2014, Google announced that it would fold its social network “Orkut”. Emboldened by the decline of market threats.Facebook revoked its users’ ability to vote on changes to its privacy policies and then (almost simultaneously with Google’s exit.Facebook(of 2019) – When users today sign up for Facebook, they agree to allow the company to track their activity across more than eight million websites and mobile applications that are connected to the internet and
They cannot opt out of this.Solution – And while users can control some of the ways in which Facebook uses their data by adjusting their privacy settings, if you choose to leave Facebook, the company still subjects you to surveillance — but you no longer have access to the settings.For now, Staying on the platform is the only effective way to manage its harms .
But now we all must aggressively enforce this antitrust principle to handle the problems of our modern economy!For more :https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/28/opinion/privacy-antitrust-facebook.html#click=https://t.co/4eYa2Dd0KA