A former operations manager responsible for Facebook’s privacy efforts said the company “prioritized data collection from its users over protecting them from abuse.”

In a sharply-critical New York Times opinion piece that published Monday, Sandy Parakilas said Facebook “has no incentive to police the collection or use of data,” on its users, given its business model of selling online ads.

“I led Facebook’s efforts to fix privacy problems on its developer platform in advance of its 2012 initial public offering. What I saw from the inside was a company that prioritized data collection from its users over protecting them from abuse,” she wrote in the post, which you can read here.

“The fact that Facebook prioritized data collection over user protection and regulatory compliance is precisely what made it so attractive” to advertisers, wrote Parakilas, who worked as an operations manager on the platform team at Facebook in 2011 and 2012.

Facebook ad sales are expected to climb 45 percent this year to $27.6 billion, according to Thomson Reuters, growth that has helped push up its shares more than 50 percent this year and making founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg the world’s fifth-richest person, according to Forbes.

Parakilas suggested the company Zuckerberg leads is obsessed with its press coverage and will only protect user data “when negative press or regulators are involved.”

“The message was clear: The company just wanted negative stories to stop. It didn’t really care how the data was used,” said Parakilas, who is not the first former manager at the company to criticize it this year.

“Lawmakers shouldn’t allow Facebook to regulate itself. Because it won’t,” Paralikas wrote, referring to several bills before Congress, one which would rely on Facebook itself to report users who violate its rules on hate speech and another to enforce a buyer disclaimer on political ads.

An email to Facebook seeking comment was not immediately returned.

Source: Tech CNBC
Ex-Facebook privacy manager says company cares more about data collection than protecting users