7th Day of Pesach: Facebook, Privacy Policies and the Splitting of the Sea: What to Reveal and What to Conceal?

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Published: 04/5/18

The revelation that Facebook allowed access to private personal data of some 50 millions user to Cambridge Analytica has sent shocks and tremors across the digital (and analogue) world.

Facebook stores trillions of data points on hundreds of millions of people, you (if you’re one of two billion Facebook users) included.

So does Google, Amazon, Apple, Netflix, YouTube, and every other website and technology company worth its terabytes.

Does not Amazon suggest uncannily accurate products? Does not Netflix know exactly what shows interest you? And what about when that spooky banner ad pops up for a product you recently searched?

And what about the over-sharing and overexposure of Instagram, Snapchat, Instachat, and Snapgram?

You know your privacy is non-existent when you have to acknowledge o-so-many perpetually updated privacy policies. If a company has a privacy policy, one that updates monthly, you know you’ve got a problem.

In this revolutionary technological age, wondrous in so many ways, is privacy a thing of the past?

Have secrets become fossilized? Is personal information a bygone?

On this seventh day of Passover, as we celebrate the splitting of the sea, when the hidden is revealed, what does the Torah say about privacy in an overexposed world, about personal space in an increasingly public domain?