Welcome to the commentary magazine podcast. I am John Puthworth. It's the editor of commentary.

The 70-odd year old monthly of intellectual analysis, political,

property, and cultural criticism from a conservative perspective. We invite you to join us at

commentarymagazine.com where we give you a few free reads and ask you to subscribe

1995 for a digital subscription 2995 for an all-access subscription, including our beautiful monthly

magazine in your mailbox 11 times. A year with me as always, senior editor A. Greenwald. Hi,

John. Associate editor Noah Rothman. Hi, John. And social commentary columnist and incoming,

I don't think we've figured out your title yet, but incoming commentary staff are Christine Rosen.

Hi, Christine. Hi, John. So Christine, I want to turn to you first because

the big domestic news, I think, in some ways was this New York Times investigative report on

more Facebook privacy malfeasance. And I thought maybe you could sort of lay out for everybody

of what's going on and place it in the larger context about Facebook and social media and the

political scene at the moment. Sure. The most recent story that you mentioned, the New York Times

story, revealed that since about 2010, Facebook's been letting what they call partners, which are

companies like Netflix, Spotify, Bing. There's actually a Chinese device manufacturer in there.

Amazon, Yahoo, even Apple have access to the data of hundreds of millions of people every month,

Facebook users allowed them to read private messages, allowed them to see the names of their

Facebook friends without their consent. And in the case of Apple, for example, allowed to even hide

from Facebook users any indication that the devices were asking for data. So the big question now

is, oh, and of course, the Facebook response was textbook Facebook response as it's been to all of

these privacy bruhaha's, which is to say, you know, the oh no, well, we considered these partners

extensions of Facebook, you know, this was about helping people. It was about making things more

...