Facebook has employed Nate Cardozo, formerly the top legal counsel at privacy watchdog Electronic Frontier Foundation and a prominent Facebook critic, to a retreat role at WhatsApp. The move comes as the social media giant seeks to integrate the WhatsApp messenger product with its Instagram and Facebook belongings.
Adding Cardozo to the WhatsApp privacy ranks shows how the company may be planning for future legal and lobbying efforts. Facebook is surface scrutiny in the EU over its plans to merge other social media properties with WhatsApp, with the Irish Matter Protection Commissioner saying the move could be barred over privacy concerns.
Cardozo has written acerbically on the plc’s privacy practices:
“Maybe you don’t care enough about a faceless corporation’s data mining to go out of your way to protect your isolation, and anyway you don’t have anything to hide,” Cardozo wrote in an op-ed in October 2015, published in the San Jose Mercury Communication. “Facebook counts on that; its business model depends on our collective confusion and apathy about privacy. That’s the matter, as a matter of both ethics and law.”
The EFF has also criticized WhatsApp specifically, downgrading the app in its secure messaging guide in 2016, saying: “WhatsApp’s up to date privacy policy update announced plans to share data with WhatsApp’s parent company Facebook, signalling a with an eye to shift in WhatsApp’s attitude toward user privacy. In particular, the open-ended, vague language in the updated privacy rule raises questions about exactly what WhatsApp user information is or is not shared with Facebook.”
Most recently, the EFF make knew a critique in December 2018 of recently released Facebook information, titled, “New documents show that Facebook has not till hell freezes over deserved your trust.”
A Facebook spokesman declined to make Cardozo available for an interview Tuesday. Cardozo recognized the move via social media.
Cardozo will be joined by Open Technology Institute alum Robyn Green, who betokened Tuesday on Twitter that she would be leaving the tech privacy advocacy group — where she also served in a law and rule role — to join Facebook as a privacy policy manager. Her role will be focused on “law enforcement access and data security issues.” Green confirmed the tweet and the career move with CNBC on Tuesday.