I don’t write about Facebook very often because many people that I care about are—inexplicably—Facebook devotees and if I wrote about Facebook to the extent warranted, I would likely alienate my friends and loved ones. Still, sometimes Facebook’s behavior is so outrageous that it’s hard not to agree with John Gruber of Daring Fireball that Facebook is a criminal enterprise as he often says.
Facebook’s latest example of sketchy behavior is their attempt to gain access to whois data in contravention of GDPR rules. Their contention is that it’s okay because they only want to identify the domain owners who are masquerading as Facebook in order to scam unsuspecting users. That sounds reasonable until you discover that some of the domain names they’re concerned about are letsfacethebook.com, zharfambook.com, addictedtofacebook.org, banned-by-facebook.com, divestfacebook.com, facebooksucks.org, and protestfacebook.org.
Does anyone here know someone dumb enough that they’d think any of these are legitimate Facebook domains? Even my Aunt Millie isn’t going to credit that. Facebook, as it always does, simply wants the data and they’re not going to stop until they get it. As I’ve said before, Facebook, Google, and the others will continue with this type of behavior until their executives start going to jail. We already have ample evidence that fines are not going to stop them. The DOJ or one of the EU enforcement agencies spend years building a case and the result is a fine, seemingly large, that amounts to a day’s profit.