Today's Must-Read #2: Sociopath du Jour

Mark Zuckerberg, a/k/a Facebook:

Concern about Facebook Inc’s (FB.O) respect for data privacy is widening to include the information it collects about non-users, after Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg said the world’s largest social network tracks people whether they have accounts or not.

Privacy concerns have swamped Facebook since it acknowledged last month that information about millions of users wrongly ended up in the hands of political consultancy Cambridge Analytica, a firm that has counted U.S. President Donald Trump’s 2016 electoral campaign among its clients.

Zuckerberg said on Wednesday under questioning by U.S. Representative Ben Luján that, for security reasons, Facebook also collects “data of people who have not signed up for Facebook.”

I had been patting myself on the back for never having signed up for Facebook -- looks like my congratulations were premature. If they're collecting data on me just for visiting a site that is in some way associated with FB -- like those blogs on which you can only comment using your Facebook ID -- well, words fail me.

And thinking about it, I'd be willing to bet that this is standard practice among these tech/internet giants (can you say "Google"? I'd say "Time to change search engines," but then it occurs to me that Google owns YouTube and Blogger.)

Remember privacy? We used to be able to have some. And just think: this is the conservatives'/libertarians' ideal world -- just let the ruling class decide what's appropriate.