Facebook Cares about Privacy (for Facebook Executives)
The New York Times reported yesterday on the rise of a new type of non-disclosure agreement in connection with home construction. Basically, rich people associated with the tech industry are making everyone who works on their homes sign sweeping non-disclosure agreements.
Times reporter Matt Richtel posed a number of questions to workers outside a home that, court documents from a different case reveal, is being renovated for an undisclosed Facebook executive (pictured). He was able to extract only answers like, “I’m an electrician working on a house.” As to which house, workers would gesture towards a neighborhood and say “one of the ones over there.” But the mystery was not too difficult to solve, as workers swarmed “like ants” on the home, and they have been working on it for two years.
Matt Richtel does a great job highlighting the irony of the situation. He quotes Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg, commenting on Facebook’s privacy policies, as follows: “People have really gotten comfortable not only sharing more information and different kinds, but more openly and with more people.” And yet, in correspondence disclosed in the other case referenced above, Mr. Zuckerberg’s attorney wrote, “Mr. Zuckerberg goes to great lengths to protect the privacy of his personal life.”
There is no necessary contradiction between Mr. Zuckerberg’s desire to maintain his own privacy and his belief that other people choose not to protect their own. But Facebook has been pretty aggressive in eroding privacy, in part through a libertarian paternalism in which all the default choices lead to a surrender of privacy, or through extracting waivers of privacy rights by contractual means that do not rise to the level of meaningful, knowing consent.
So yeah. This is ironic.