Best read in its entirety rather than for any particular quotes. Nevertheless, here's the short version.
Dear Mark,
Fuck you. Oh, sorry, were you expecting something politer? Senators might thank for you volunteering to appear in Congress, but you helped Russian propagandists influence an election and exposed the personal data of over a billion people, so I think we're past the point of being grateful.
I’d like to know how I can escape Facebook's surveillance. I know, I know, you get this question all the time. And you have an answer: if you don’t want to be tracked, just change your privacy settings. When you say that, you don’t really mean it. If someone on Facebook opts out of tracking, you’ll still track them – you’ll just stop letting advertisers target them in creepy, ill-defined ways.
But I have a problem: I’m not on Facebook. I’ve never been on Facebook. I’ve never opted into your service. So, Mark, can you tell me: how do I opt out? In your testimony to Congress, you said: “Anyone can turn off or opt out of any data collection for ads, whether they use our services or not.” But, as you should know, while that’s possible for someone on Facebook, for me, a non-Facebook user, it’s not.
Your illegal trackers follow me across 30 per cent of the internet, building a “shadow profile” you store in a nonanonymised format in your “Hive” analysis database. You claim to do it “for security purposes” (let me tell you, if Facebook’s security requires you to surveil the world’s population, then you have made a desert and called it peace).
What can I do to stop you? I've installed tracker blockers on my browser, but, since you killed the media business, a lot of my favourite sites make me disable them. And your trackers work in the apps on my phone.
As you recently observed, “In a lot of ways, Facebook is more like a government than a traditional company.” True – but it’s neither legitimate nor good; it is a corrupt, despotic government, deceiving its citizens at home, even as it imposes its barren colonialism abroad. You had the opportunity to lay the foundations for a global governmental infrastructure. Instead, you charged ahead with your self-appointed “mission”, never wondering how it could go wrong.
http://www.wired.co.uk/article/open-letter-mark-zuckerberg-congress
This is well worth reading.
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