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Dear Facebook, no means no. Even for your 'partners'

Facebook isn't some altruistic firm that just happened to overstep the line in its endeavour to do good; it is a habitual offender.

Consent can be a tricky thing. Just ask tainted American film producer Harvey Weinstein. It changes with context, and context changes often, many a time based on perception, choice, opinion, mood... You may like someone or something today but could change your opinion tomorrow. Then there's affirmative consent, where a 'yes' is a must as opposed to the absence of a 'no'. Add power play to the equation, where saying 'no' may come with its own perceived perils and penalties and not saying 'no' may have its incentives, and it becomes clear why the concept can be less than crystal to some.
But surely it is fathomable for a cerebral company like, say, Facebook. Turns out it isn't. Last week, markets punished FB by wiping out $31 billion, or 7.5 per cent of its worth. The reason? Mark Zuckerberg lied about user privacy, consent, trust.
Yes, yes, he'd admitted to lying about 'that' in July in front of the US Congress, under oath. But a new investigation by The New York Times reveals that even as Zuckerberg was apologising, FB may have continued to give some of its partners - including Amazon, Microsoft, Spotify, and Netflix - special access to our personal data, often in ways that contradicted its own purported privacy policies.
What's deplorable isn't that Zuckerberg may have lied about it (less-than-sincere business owners have been known to lie to promote their interests), but the fact that the world - you and me - has allowed this charade to go on for so long. In 2009, it took legal action by a bunch of infuriated users for FB to shutter Beacon, its controversial service which leaked details of our shopping activity. In 2011, the Federal Trade Commission came out with a long list of charges against FB: It shared our friends list, it gave apps access to nearly all of our personal data, it shared our personal info with advertisers, all without user consent. In 2014, FB conducted mood manipulation experiments on unsuspecting users. In 2015, it admitted it couldn't track how many apps downloaded by our friends were misusing our data. And in 2018, the floodgates opened, starting with the Cambridge Analytica data harvesting scandal to last week's NYT exposé.
FB's response, every single time, has been to apologise for the betrayal, after it has tried to, in the words of NYT, "delay, deny and deflect" the charges. Let's face it:
Facebook isn't some altruistic firm that just happened to overstep the line in its endeavour to do good; it is a habitual offender. Much like Harvey Weinstein, it understands the import of consent but believes it can manipulate us into thinking that it has our best interest at heart. It took the #MeToo movement to out sexual predators. Perhaps it's time FB mends its ways before users #deleteFacebook. If data is the new oil, we need a new data Opec, a body that can regulate growth-hungry Internet giants such as Facebook and protect user interest.