Facebook and Privacy

Dipayan Ghosh wrote a letter to the editor at The New York Times about regulating Facebook: 

Re “Facebook Won’t Protect Your Privacy” (Op-Ed, Nov. 20):

Sandy Parakilas’s view that Facebook should be more strictly regulated because the company would never regulate itself is a deeply flawed argument.

Mr. Parakilas argues that Facebook has no incentive to protect privacy. This is untrue; maintaining privacy is a critical mission at Facebook. In fact, my team’s role at Facebook was to scrutinize forthcoming products and protect our users from privacy, security and safety hazards.

We may indeed need to regulate Facebook more tightly, but as a capitalist society that values innovation, we should be careful not to skew regulation against a single company.