Facebook as the scorpion

In this clip from Star Trek Voyager Chakotay tells the parable of The Scorpion and the Fox

Facebook is clearly a scorpion. Central to their business is the collection of as much information as possible about people, so Facebook can help their customers optimally manipulate you (see “The Rise of the Manipulation Platforms”).

As described in recode’s “Apple says it’s banning Facebook’s research app that collects user’ personal information” Facebook once again demonstrates that like the scorpion, it can’t help but do what it does.

Apple’s response, via a PR rep this morning: “We designed our Enterprise Developer Program solely for the internal distribution of apps within an organization. Facebook has been using their membership to distribute a data-collecting app to consumers, which is a clear breach of their agreement with Apple. Any developer using their enterprise certificates to distribute apps to consumers will have their certificates revoked, which is what we did in this case to protect our users and their data.”

They bend rules, break rules, and lie or mislead about what they have done with regularity and with no evidence of true remorse.

It will be interesting to see how this battle with Apple shakes out.

(Note, in a somewhat similar episode, Google cut off trust in Symantec (and every web site that used Symantec to sign their certificates) after Symantec repeatedly abused the Internet’s trust model. “Chrome’s Plan to Distrust Symantec Certificates”)