ecall the NY Times video that we watched during our 2nd class meeting, "How Facebook is Changing Your Internet". (To refresh your memory, see https://nyti.ms/2y8o8WC .) With this in mind, please respo

F acebook kno ws what you look lik e, your loc ation, who y our friends ar e, your inter ests, if you’r e in a r elationship or not, and what other pages y ou look at on the web. This dat a allows adv ertisers to target the mor e than one billion Facebook visitor s a day. It’ s no w onder the compan y has ballooned in size to a $500 bil lion behemoth in the five year s since its I.P.O.

The mor e data it has on of fer, the mor e value it cr eates for adv ertisers.

That means it has no incenti ve to police the col lection or use of that dat a — except when negative pr ess or r egulator s are involv ed. F acebook is free to do almost whatev er it wants with y our personal information, and has no r eason to put safeguar ds in place.

We C an’t T ru st F a ce b ook t o R eg u la te I ts e lf For a few y ears, F acebook ’s dev eloper platform hosted a thri ving ecosystem of popular social g ames. Remember the age of F armville and Candy Crush? T he premise w as simple: U sers agr eed to gi ve g ame dev eloper s access to their dat a in exchange for fr ee use of addictive games.

U nfortunately for the user s of these games, there were no pr otections around the dat a they were pas sed thr ough Facebook to outside developer s. Once dat a went to the dev eloper of a game, there was not much F acebook could do about misuse except to c all the dev eloper in question and thr eaten to cut off the developer’s access. As the I.P .O.

appr oached, and the media r eported on allegations of misuse of dat a, I, as manager of the team responsible for protecting users on the developer platform from abuse of their dat a, was gi ven the t ask of solving the problem.

In one inst ance, a dev eloper appear ed to be using F acebook data to automatically gener ate profiles of childr en, without their consent. When I cal led the compan y responsible for the app, it claimed that F acebook’s policies on dat a use were not being violated, but w e had no way to confirm whether that w as true. Once data passed fr om the platform to a developer , Facebook had no view of the dat a or control over it. I n other cases, dev elopers asked for permis sion to get user dat a that their apps obviously didn ’t need — such as a social g ame asking for all of your photos and mes sages. People rarely r ead permis sions request forms car eful ly, so they often authorize ac cess to sensiti ve information without realizing it.

A t a compan y that was deeply concerned about pr otecting its users, this situation would have been met with a r obust effort to cut of f developer s who w ere making questionable use of dat a. But when I was at Facebook, the typical reaction I r ecall look ed lik e this: try to put an y negative pr ess cover age to bed as quickly as pos sible, with no sincere efforts to put safeguar ds in place or to identify and stop abusi ve dev eloper s. When I proposed a deeper audit of dev elopers’ use of F acebook’s dat a, one executi ve ask ed me, “Do y ou really w ant to see what y ou’l l find?” T he mes sage was clear: T he compan y just wanted neg ative stories to stop. It didn ’t r eal ly c are ho w the dat a was used.

When Rus sians decided to t arget Americ ans during the 2016 election, they didn’t bu y TV or newspaper ads, or hir e a skywriter. They turned to Facebook, wher e their content r eached at least 126 mil lion Americans.

The fact that F acebook prioritized dat a collection o ver user pr otection and regulatory compliance is pr ecisely what made it so attracti ve. N ow the compan y is arguing that it should be al lowed to r egulate itself to prev ent this fr om happening ag ain. My experience sho ws that it should not.

Facebook ’s chief oper ating officer, Sheryl Sand berg, mentioned in an October interview with Axios that one of the w ays the compan y uncover ed Rus sian pr opaganda ads w as by identifying that they had been pur chased in rubles. Gi ven ho w easy this w as, it seems clear the discovery could ha ve come much sooner than it did — a y ear after the election. But apparently Facebook took the same appr oach to this investig ation as the one I observ ed during my tenure: react only when the pr ess or r egulator s make something an is sue, and avoid an y changes that w ould hurt the busines s of collecting and sel ling data.

This mak es for a danger ous mix: a compan y that reaches most of the country ev ery day and has the most det ailed set of personal data ever assembled, but has no incenti ve to pr event abuse. F acebook needs to be regulated mor e tightly, or broken up so that no single entit y controls all of its dat a. The compan y won’t pr otect us b y itself, and nothing les s than our democracy is at st ake. Sandy P arakilas worked as an oper ations manager on the pla tform team a t Facebook in 2011 and 2012.

Follo w The N ew Y ork Times Opinion section on Fac ebook and Twit ter (@NY Topinion) , and sign up for the Opinion T oday ne wsle tter . A version o f this article appears in print on Nov . 19, 2017 , on P age A23 of the N ew York edition with the headline: Facebook W onʼt P rotect Y our Privacy REA D 5 81 C O M MEN TS