2 min read
There is no invasion of privacy at all, because there is no privacy: Orin Snyder.
This statement was given by the lawyer of the social media giant Facebook Orin Snyder during a hearing in a class-action lawsuit against the company over Cambridge Analytica’s accessing of Facebook user data. Facebook’s attorney argued that you can not expect privacy on the social media platform. The attorney presented these statements while trying to convince the U.S. District Court Judge Vince Chhabria to dismiss the lawsuit against his client.
He also said that users had given their consent to Facebook to share their data or information with the third parties. he added, “You have to closely guard something to have a reasonable expectation of privacy”.
This statement from the media giant’s lawyer came right before the statement made by the Facebook’s CEO Mark Zuckerberg, who said that he wants to build a social platform focused on privacy, in a meeting with the shareholder.
Zuckerberg told shareholders, “One of the big themes that we’re going to be pushing on for the next 5 to 10 years is building out this vision of a privacy-focused social platform”. He added that Facebook is a public platform, like a digital town square, but privacy would be a major focus of the company in the future.
But, on the other hand, Orin argued before the judge that “Sharing something with a large crowd (like your Facebook followers) forfeits your right to privacy. This creates a big conflict as to what the company’s narrative about privacy, actually is. Facebook is already under severe criticism from the users over privacy issues and the data sharing with third parties which the platform did in the past. Statements like this will only create more uncertainty in the minds of users about social media privacy.
