Mark Zuckerberg
Credit: Frederic Legrand

It’s the tech bro equivalent of a 1950s B-movie: Evil data scientists betray the simple trust of an unwitting, socially benevolent company to snatch private customer data and turn it against them and the world! Mark Zuckerberg’s apology for what has happened at Facebook more or less follows that script.

Don’t get me wrong — I’m sure Zuckerberg is very sorry that his share price has plummeted and that the #DeleteFacebook movement is gaining momentum, putting billions of dollars in shareholder value at risk.

But this story is not about Facebook’s rules being broken, or the apps that seek to discern a more algorithmically predictable “you” through inane clickbait quizzes about which philosopher or dog breed you like best. It’s not, fundamentally, about Cambridge Analytica, or even about Facebook. If you delete Facebook because you’re worried about privacy, you’ll have to delete almost every other app and platform too, because almost everything else on the internet is operating the same way.

This story, at root, is about what you don’t know […]