It’s your own fault that Facebook and Google spy on you so much

Here's a hypothetical scenario. There's a house on your street that, as bad luck would have it, keeps getting broken into by thieves. Over and over again. The damage varies from attack to attack, but it's almost always considerable. The police know who the perpetrators are, but their words to the victims are cold comfort, because their hands are basically tied -- it seems as though there's not really much the cops can do. The weird thing about this episode, though, is that (come to find out) the homeowner keeps leaving their front door unlocked, as well as the garage door open. After each incident. As a matter of fact, so do many neighbors on the street. And here's the strangest part: The thieves have started apologizing, profusely, and promising to live on the straight and narrow going forward. Until they don't, and the whole cycle starts back up again.

In a very crude and imperfect way, that's kind of how it seems like the past week has unfolded, in terms of the now all-too-familiar flurry of data privacy-related news headlines stemming from Facebook's latest data leak. As we noted over the weekend, there’s been another huge Facebook data leak, in case you haven't heard -- this one encompassing personal information from more than 533 million Facebook users from 106 countries. This data was posted in a hacking forum, according to a report from Insider, which is to say — if you have a Facebook account, there’s a good chance your data has once again been exposed to hackers including everything from your phone number to your email address, birthday, full name, and more. In this post, I'd like to talk about something missing in all the hue and cry over Facebook's latest misstep, and it applies more broadly to include companies like Google, as well.