Last week I bowed to pressures and created a Facebook account. My family is quite spread out around the USA and wanted to stay more up to date. Having had a Facebook account a few times since 2007 I felt like I knew what I was getting into and Meta already had all my data from Instagram so “whatever”.

I somehow avoided installing the iOS app for the first few days until I tried to post a short video and Facebook via web kept choking (likely on purpose). Gave up, installed the app and immediately when opening the app on first run a vauguely worded pop up told me why I should allow access to my contacts. The only option was “next”. I killed the app, tried again, immediate pop up to allow contacts, only option “next”. Killed the app again, relaunched, immediate pop up again, clicked “next”, and when given iOS prompt to allow I clicked “Don’t Allow”, app stuck hanging on a blank white screen (why didn’t I take screen shots?!).

Killed the app AGAIN, relaunched, immediate pop up, but this time it launched a screen showing all of my contacts with available accounts to follow. My brain stuck on that point for a bit as I never allowed iOS access to contacts. I validated this in iOS settings and went back to the app to look at the screen again. Then I realized that even though the screen stated these were my contacts with accounts the list was not my contacts but merely accounts that Facebook somehow connected me to via existing friends.

I consider myself decently intelligent and savvy around privacy matters but am left wondering how a regular user understands any of this and why is Meta allowed to behave this way. Instead of developing clear language that puts privacy choices into a user’s hands the language is intentionally developed to deceive and obfuscate.