To add to the holiday merriment, it was reported that Facebook allowed Microsoft’s Bing search engine to see the names of virtually all Facebook users’ friends without consent, gave Netflix and Spotify the ability to read Facebook users’ private messages, and that Apple devices had access to the contact numbers and calendar entries of Facebook users who had changed their account settings to disable all sharing. 

It gets worse, but that should be sufficient to make the point that Facebook has been screwing its users from the very start. 

After all, Facebook is not the product. You are: you and your data. That’s how it makes its money, using the data you think you voluntarily gave up — and now, it appears, the data you thought you were NEVER giving up — to attract advertisers and “partners” that received access to your allegedly “private” information.

Similarly, between Chrome and Android, Google knows EVERYTHING you do online and on your phone, including the sites you visit that you would not want your parents or significant other or employers to know you visit. I’m not talking just about porn. If you search for information on, say, alcoholism, gender identity, chlamydia or building a bomb, Google sees it, records it and uses it to sell ads.

Some are shrugging off all these privacy betrayals as just “life on the internet,” and that ”you should know by now all this happens.” 

But that’s the easy way out. Just ignore it. Chances are it will never come back to bite you, right? With the Idiot in the White House, we have bigger things to worry about.

Those who spin the yarns about how your data could one day be used to round you up and incarcerate (or kill) everyone else like you, are the exaggerated fears of those who read too much George Orwell, right? 

Not really. It has happened before — and, given the current thinking, attitude, temperaments and actions of those we have elected to run our governments at every level — nothing is beyond this reality.  Think back to the Patriot Act, which gave the feds unprecedented permission to spy on you without your knowledge.  That is exactly what Facebook and Google are doing, only on a vastly larger scale.

Think those police procedurals on TV where “get me the video from that surveillance camera” leads to an arrest or a shootout are the stuff of fiction? Not really. Are you pretty happy that your face is the only ticket you will need to get on a plane within a year or two? 

Now take everything that Facebook, Google, Amazon, etc., your bank, your doctor and your government know about you — and put it the hands of a hacker. How ya feelin’ now?

Data about you never disappears. It just gets added to. In the old days, we used to worry about PII and how to assure users that it was being protected. Now data it so personal that you no longer have any secrets that are not known by somebody else somewhere. 

With the internet, we have made a deal with the devil — and one day he will come to collect.