by Karl Denninger, Market Ticker:

So Zucker****er appears to be a perjurer, which means he’s now an accused felon.

He lied to Congress, specifically, telling them repeatedly in testimony that you own your data and have complete control over who it is shared with.

That was a lie.

Specifically, Facebook has been peddling private messages to their “partners.”

But an investigative piece in yesterday’s New York Times involves a very different kind of ethical breach — one that critics say rises to outright betrayal.

Facebook is merchandizing access to your private messages.

That is like a gut punch — the one area on the post-everything site where its more than 2 billion users felt assured they had absolute privacy.

And yet, documents obtained by the Times show the company granted Netflix and Spotify the ability to read confidential messages.

The company says any such “sharing” only happened with user consent.  But this too is a lie.  It’s a lie because you cannot give consent for someone to see your associate’s message, in whole or part, quoted or not, as there is no circumstance under which you can consent on behalf of someone else.

You’re not the other person.  You cannot consent for the other person.  Never mind that nobody would read a “consent” document, or terms-of-service as granting permission for some third party, no matter who, to have access to personal, private messagesexcept under penalty of law (e.g. subpoena.)

Yet that’s what the NY Times says happened.

Facebook says they have never “sold” your data.  Of course they have; that a transaction is not denominated in dollars, specifically, for the specific act doesn’t mean it wasn’t “sold.”

If anything of value was received then the data was sold.  And much of value was received — Facebook says over $25/per-person/per-quarter in North America, meaning in the United States (mostly) — including for all those “users” who are really cats, dogs, and your second parakeet.

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