Stephen L. Carter, Columnist

In Apple vs. Facebook, Let Users Decide

If people want to give up some data in exchange for money, they should be able to do so.

February 7, 2019 at 2:00 PM UTC

Stephen L. Carter is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist, a professor of law at Yale University and author of “Invisible: The Story of the Black Woman Lawyer Who Took Down America’s Most Powerful Mobster.”

Uncomfortable partners.
Photographer: Johannes Berg/Bloomberg

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Pardon me while I offer a few words in Facebook’s defense. I stand by my previous column, in which I noted that the company had once more goofed on privacy with a research app that vacuumed up information from users’ mobile phones. On issues concerning user data, Facebook seems unable to improve its tin ear.

Nevertheless, my libertarian instinct on freedom of contract compels me to defend a group caught up, perhaps to their own surprise, in this battle: users who downloaded the app and liked the money they got from it. The burden of the criticism is that Facebook took advantage of them.