Former National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden ripped Facebook in a tweet Saturday after the social media giant suspended Cambridge Analytica, a data analytics firm which worked worked for President Trump’s campaign.

Facebook accused the firm on Friday of not deleting data it had improperly harvested from Facebook users, which number in the tens of millions, but Snowden pinned the blame squarely on Facebook and lumped in other social media companies for being just as reckless.

"Facebook makes their money by exploiting and selling intimate details about the private lives of millions, far beyond the scant details you voluntarily post," Snowden said earlier in the day. "They are not victims. They are accomplices."

Turning Off Facebook Location Tracking Doesn't Stop It From Tracking Your Location

Aleksandra Korolova has turned off Facebook’s access to her location in every way that she can. She has turned off location history in the Facebook app and told her iPhone that she “Never” wants the app to get her location. She doesn’t “check-in” to places and doesn’t list her current city on her profile.

Despite all this, she constantly sees location-based ads on Facebook. She sees ads targeted at “people who live near Santa Monica” (where she lives) and at “people who live or were recently near Los Angeles” (where she works as an assistant professor at the University of Southern California). When she traveled to Glacier National Park, she saw an ad for activities in Montana, and when she went on a work trip to Cambridge, Massachusetts, she saw an ad for a ceramics school there.

Facebook was continuing to track Korolova’s location for ads despite her signaling in all the ways that she could that she didn’t want Facebook doing that.

As Facebook Raised a Privacy Wall, It Carved an Opening for Tech Giants

For years, Facebook gave some of the world’s largest technology companies more intrusive access to users’ personal data than it has disclosed, effectively exempting those business partners from its usual privacy rules, according to internal records and interviews.

The special arrangements are detailed in hundreds of pages of Facebook documents obtained by The New York Times. The records, generated in 2017 by the company’s internal system for tracking partnerships, provide the most complete picture yet of the social network’s data-sharing practices. They also underscore how personal data has become the most prized commodity of the digital age, traded on a vast scale by some of the most powerful companies in Silicon Valley and beyond.

The exchange was intended to benefit everyone. Pushing for explosive growth, Facebook got more users, lifting its advertising revenue. Partner companies acquired features to make their products more attractive. Facebook users connected with friends across different devices and websites. But Facebook also assumed extraordinary power over the personal information of its 2.2 billion users — control it has wielded with little transparency or outside oversight.

Facebook allowed Microsoft’s Bing search engine to see the names of virtually all Facebook users’ friends without consent, the records show, and gave Netflix and Spotify the ability to read Facebook users’ private messages.

The social network permitted Amazon to obtain users’ names and contact information through their friends, and it let Yahoo view streams of friends’ posts as recently as this summer, despite public statements that it had stopped that type of sharing years earlier.

I have no actual evidence that the phone is listening to us but anymore if we have something touchy to talk about I put the phones in a Pelican case before the conversation.