# Facebook and Google’s pervasive surveillance poses an unprecedented danger to human rights | Amnesty International

<https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2019/11/google-facebook-surveillance-privacy/>

- Host: [amnesty.org](https://links.thingelstad.xyz/hosts/amnesty.org/)
- Saved: November 27, 2019 (2019-11-28T01:49:10Z)
- Record: https://links.thingelstad.xyz/links/2d4d363fd90f/
- JSON: https://links.thingelstad.xyz/links/2d4d363fd90f.json

## What Jamie wrote

More piling on to Facebook and Google. 

> [_Surveillance Giants _](https://www.amnesty.org/en/documents/pol30/1404/2019/en/)lays out how the surveillance-based business model of Facebook and Google is inherently incompatible with the right to privacy and poses a systemic threat to a range of other rights including freedom of opinion and expression, freedom of thought, and the right to equality and non-discrimination.

This article brings in the idea of a "public square".

> While other Big Tech companies – including Apple, Amazon and Microsoft – have accrued significant power in other areas, it is the platforms owned by Facebook and Google that have become fundamental to how people engage and interact with each other – effectively a new global public square.

This is foundational to my issue with these platforms. They present themselves as the public square, but they are anything but. With that said though, I don't think the right answer is to force them to be a public square. They are private companies and can do as they wish for their shareholders. However, they should have strict rules and regulations, and even more importantly, their users should know they are more like a shopping mall, and nothing at all like a public square. Facebook isn't a church or a park. You have no right to do anything there that they don't want you to, and you have as much right to privacy as you do when you are walking around any other business.

## Facts

- Kind: [Page](https://links.thingelstad.xyz/kinds/page/)

## Appears in

- [WT128: Weekly Thing #128 / Nov 30, 2019](https://weekly.thingelstad.com/archive/128/), Notable Links 📌

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## Elsewhere

- Wayback Machine: https://web.archive.org/web/*/https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2019/11/google-facebook-surveillance-privacy/