Down goes Facebook! (on this issue)
It’s been a depressing week for progressives. Team Jimmy attacking Team Ana, the feckless Democrats becoming fecklesser. Joe Manchin…um, manchinning?
But I got an email today with news of at least one victory that shows change is possible, even when going up against one of the richest and most powerful companies on the planet. And it’s largely thanks to an organization called Sum of Us.
WhatsApp users were going to be forced to let Whatsapp hand over their data to Facebook, who recently acquired WhatsApp. If users didn’t agree to this, they could no longer use the app.
Sum of Us launched a campaign and petition to stop this. WhatsApp users didn’t sign up for giving their data to Facebook (literally didn’t sign up for it, actually). They should have a say in it. The EU agreed, and Facebook was set to exclude EU users from this massive data transfer, but Facebook was refusing to do the same in Brazil and other countries.
In response to this, more than 200,000 people worldwide signed a petition calling on WhatsApp not to hand over user data to Facebook without explicit consent. And in response to this campaign by SumofUs and Brazil’s consumer defense institute (IDEC), the Brazilian government actually did something about it — banning the transfer of data for 90 days until a final decision could be made.
After this, WhatsApp and Facebook abandoned their plans to force users to agree to transferring their data to Facebook — not just in Brazil, but around the world, giving over 2 billion users control over their own data and their privacy. As of May 28, even if someone opts out of giving Facebook their data, they can continue to use WhatsApp.
Facebook listened to me and everyone else who signed the petition, a decision affecting 2 billion users. Are a lot of people just going to accept handing their data over to Facebook anyway? Probably. But now they’ll be given an explicit choice about who gets their data.
I’d say that it’s both a small victory (it won’t change much in people’s daily lives), but also a huge victory (benefiting 2 billion users), and hopefully making it that much harder for Facebook and others to force users to give up their private data just because they bought another company. Sometimes I tell myself it doesn’t matter if I sign a petition, or send a letter, or call a politician’s office. But sometimes, it works.
To find out more about Sum of Us, here’s their site: http://sumofus.org.
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