Edward Snowden shouldn’t be your go-to guy for analyzing Facebook

Well-known traitor Edward Snowden continues to enjoy a second career as a tech pundit. And on Twitter, he is slamming Facebook as a “surveillance” company that makes money by “collecting and selling detailed records of private lives of users.”

Edward Snowden speaks via video link during a conference at University of Buenos Aires Law School, Argentina, November 14, 2016. REUTERS/Marcos Brindicci

Now I think it is important, especially for policymakers, to understand how these companies make money and, really, the fundamentals of how their businesses work. Indeed, I asked about this issue in a podcast chat with  Tim O’Reilly, author of WTF: What’s the Future, and Why It’s Up to Us and founder and CEO of O’Reilly Media:

Pethokoukis: Do you feel like the people in Washington you talk to have a deep understanding of what makes these companies different than, say, GM? That public policymakers are even close to being able to even fix these companies, whatever those fixes mean?

O’Reilly: Not at all, and in fact that’s one of the reasons I wrote the book. I’m trying to educate people about how these things work. I tell a story of a German economic minister who invited me to speak at a conference on the digitalization of the economy, and we had a private lunch afterwards. He basically said, “Oh the only reason that Uber works is because they don’t have to follow the rules,” and I said, “Have you ever ridden in an Uber?” He said, “No I have my own driver,” And in my mind, I go “How clueless can you be?”

I still remember the same things from back in the Google Books protests, where I’m arguing with some lobbyist from the publishing industry who had never used Google. And it’s just like, people in the government have got to start using this technology, they got to understand that, because the government is an essential counterweight to companies. But you can’t basically come from a 19th century or even a 20th century understanding of how the world works and try to regulate how the 21st century works.

That said, what about the “selling data” issue? This from TechDirt is a helpful explainer:

The users (all of us) supply a bunch of data to Facebook. Facebook, over the years, has done a piss poor job of explaining to users what data it actually keeps and what it does with that data. Despite some pretty horrendous practices on this front early on, the company has tried to improve greatly over the years. And, in some sense, it has succeeded — in that users have a lot more granular control and ability to dig into what Facebook is doing with their data. But, it does take a fair bit of digging and it’s not that easy to understand — or to understand the consequences of blocking some aspects of it.

The advertisers don’t (as is all too commonly believed) “buy” data from Facebook. Instead, the buy the ability to put ads into the feeds of users who match certain profiles. Again, some will argue this is the same thing. It is not. From merely buying ads, the advertiser gets no data in return about the users. It just knows what sort of profile info it asked for the ads to appear against, and it knows some very, very basic info about how many people saw or interacted with the ads. Now, if the ad includes some sort of call to action, the advertiser might then gain some information directly from the user, but that’s still at the user’s choice.