Surely, you see a difference between a data company collecting data from users who willingly hand it to them, and a government that forces those companies to hand over private data against their will?
Sure. I also see a difference between a company asking everyone for that data in a clear fashion and one that tries get hold of every scrap of data from its users, even if it has to do with non-users (e.g. by collecting their address books).
To be clear about address books: they are "yours", but they hold data that you may not have permission to give away.
That is true, but moral standpoints are not black/white and Facebooks moral standpoint in the whole privacy debate isn't quite the strongest. Facebook will basically take any interaction with them as a "yes".
Also, Facebook didn't ask me when my friends gave my phone number and address to them.
Zuckerberg has repeatedly shown a lot of moral flexibility on those issues - so the irony is definitely there.
I hope you don't know anyone who uses Facebook, takes a picture with you in it and puts it on Facebook, or you know, have any web presence at all.
Of course to some extent I would also argue this is where things get grey - in a practical sense, private individuals do not, and have never, existed in civil society. Civil society necessitates making parts of your life public.
Facebook was caught red handed profiling literally everyone on the internet.
Every website that you ever visited with a "like" button, even porn sites. They compiled all of that information about "you" via cookies they put on your computer.
No, that would be on the person giving them the data _and_ on Facebooks side to check. Facebook never got permission, because the agent giving them the data is not allowed to give permission.
They also cannot make a reasonable assumption that the agent giving away the data _has_ permission and is lying to them.
There is no concept of "permission" here as freedom of speech is more important. If you don't want people to have your info, don't give it to people. You are perfectly entitled to "unfriend" someone (in real life) if they give away your data without your permission.
Yahoo, hotmail etc, they all used to scoop up contacts when users (willingly, just like they do with facebook) agreed to give them access in exchange for services rendered.
This is totally different from the government (a third party to either transaction) forcing Facebook to give them data (or stealing face book's data).
I think the difference is more nuanced, arguable either way. Users effectively have some sort of agreement with Facebook where Facebook get their data. Realistically this is not something they are really aware of. They use a free service. Facebook collect and use the data in way they don't understand.
Do they have that agreement with ISPs? Phones companies? Supermarkets with facial recognition software to track shopping habits?
Since a lot of this data tuff is about aggregation, entities sharing data can have a lot of consequences. If you have Facebook, Whatsapp & email data for a significant number of people, then you have a lot of data about people that aren't signed up to any of those.
I think trying to categorize data privacy issues into "users agreed to." is pedantic in a way that gets away from the reality of what is going on. The hacking vs just recording may have legal importance, but I don't think
I've said this before, the digitization & aggregations of so much data is a bigger world changing issue. The Snowden/wikileaks affairs are a strange double example. The US agencies have their data stolen and spread around because it's "data." This data is largely information about how they steal data. You can't keep your secrets from them and they have trouble keeping their secrets data from you.
"Voluntary" or "consensual" mean different things in different contexts.
"Willingly hand it to them" is not an appropriate description of the relationship people have with Facebook. It's more appropriate to say that people willingly share with their friends, and Facebook abuses its position of power as carrier of those friends' communications.
I do see a big difference between a government that has a huge cache of information about everybody that they rarely access[1] and a provate company having information about its users that it accesses regularly.
Also, facebook collects information about people who have never had a facebook account and who don't want one.
[1] the GCHQ cache was accessed less than a thousand times, for example. Google trawls my data many times a day.
Facebooks data collection is sleazy at best. You may claim that users give them the data "willingly", but the fact is that facebook collects users data even before their users have an account there. Management of the settings around privacy are also practically impossible. Facebook also ran into privacy snafus countless times.
On a bigger note - does it bother anyone that almost every privacy discussion has come to "who is lesser evil"? Kinda like politics ("we can't find a good candidate, so we are voting for the least bad candidate")
To be clear about address books: they are "yours", but they hold data that you may not have permission to give away.