Facebook has tried to hide from obvious crimes against humanity by rebranding “Meta” and allegedly has been pushing a product that entices its consumers and investors to leave reality behind (the virtual and augmented reality division lost $10.2 billion dollars in 2021).
Is it just me or… does being divorced from reality (above the law) sound like the Facebook business plan?
Australia’s federal court has now called this out formally, basically slamming Facebook lawyers as lacking any clue.
…installation of cookies on the physical devices of Australian users was enough to show it was carrying out business in Australia. […] “Further, it is clear that Facebook Ireland’s use of cookies (installed and removed by Facebook Inc) forms an important part of the operation of the Facebook platform. “It is not an outlier activity. It is one of the things ‘which makes Facebook work’.”
The court documents are an excellent read.
Micro-surgery is not undertaken by the physical, manual manipulation of a scalpel by the hand of a surgeon upon the body of a patient. The surgeon may be at an instrument, physically separated from the patient, controlling the minute device that effects the surgery. The act is taking place at both places: where the surgeon is and where the patient is. It can be characterised or conceived of as one act. There is no reason of logic or conceptual appreciation as to why the conclusion must be different depending upon the distance of separation between the two locations.
Exactly right.
Facebook was on a mad hiring spree for the last few years to recruit legal teams to find legal loopholes and cheats, rather than hiring ethicists to fix the obvious and fundamental safety flaws in their platform.
If Facebook was a hospital, their CEO would be claiming zero accountability for malpractice causing high death rates.
The big spend on lawyers apparently has manifested in Facebook appeals becoming a total clown show and making baseless arguments like Facebook doesn’t really exist, or that trying to hold Facebook accountable is dangerous, or that Facebook amounts to nothing more than sending paper mail.
The Guardian puts all this nonsense to rest in a simple paragraph.
…Cambridge Analytica harvested the personal data of millions of Facebook users without their consent using a personality test app called This is Your Digital Life. The information was then used predominantly for political advertising, including to assist the Brexit campaign and Donald Trump. Only 53 people in Australia installed the This is Your Digital Life app, according to court documents, but it was able to harvest the data of about 311,127 people.
Right away you can see Facebook is operating in Australia, Facebook is dangerous and needs regulation, and Facebook is far more harmful than other media because of the “realities of securing big data” (my book).