Facebook was founded by Mark Zuckerberg and launched on February 4, 2004. The platform began exclusively for US college students, once the “trend” was established, they opened up the platform to the wider public, globally. This social media platform allows people around the world to voluntarily provide a wealth of their personal information including facial photos, voice and listening (microphone & camera), text, location data, habits, family and social relationships, interests and education and so much more.
Curiously the same day Facebook was launched the 2003 DARPA/Pentegon project Lifelog was shut down due to a “change in priorities”. [1, 2, 3]
Lifelog was an “ambitious effort to build a database tracking a person’s entire existence” that had referenced Microsoft’s MyLifeBits project. A government tracking it’s citizens is illegal without a warrant.
Ex-DARPA employees such as Regina Dugan went across to work for Facebook. It is heavily involved in “cutting-edge experiments and hardware” research projects. [4, 5, 6]
Facebook now has the power to surveil, track, influence and censor citizens of the world not just internally, and via granting unauthorised access to user data through “data-sharing deals“ with hundreds of external companies. Why won’t China allow Facebook?
Zuckerberg is married to his Chinese “college sweetheart”, Priscilla Chan, together they formed their influential, philanthropic Chan-Zuckerberg Foundation.
Do Big Tech companies like Facebook, Google and Twitter function as publicly acceptable fronts for domestic (illegal) spying/data collection operations?