In September, Ms. Srinivasan became a technical consultant to the team of lawyers in the Texas attorney general’s office working on the investigation into Google. Facebook has said that concerns about its handling of privacy and harmful content are important, but they are not antitrust issues. (The discussion was in the news at the time because the Justice Department had brought its own antitrust case against the trade association in 2005. Ms. Srinivasan said she had an epiphany in June 2014, when Facebook announced that it would start tracking the behavior of users across the internet — and outside of its network — to sharpen its ad targeting. Even as her colleagues celebrated the news as an important breakthrough for advertisers, Ms. Srinivasan couldn’t shake the feeling that this represented a failure of the free market.

Source: New York Times December 20, 2020 18:11 UTC