Just hours after civil rights groupscalled onFacebooks top executives to step down from the companys board for allowing viral propaganda and bigoted campaigns to spread on the platform, demands for CEO Mark Zuckerberg to resign intensified after abombshell New York Timesreportlate Tuesday detailed a special arrangement the social media behemoth had with tech corporations that gave them access to users data and private messages without consent.

An incredibly damning indictment of Facebook, every single paragraph, Trevor Timm, executive director of the Freedom of the Press Foundation,wroteof the_Times_report, which is the latest in along lineofrecent revelationsabout Facebooks intrusive and possibly illegal data practices.

Citing hundreds of pages of internal company records and interviews with dozens of former employees, the_Times_reported that Facebook allowed Microsofts Bing search engine to see the names of virtually all Facebook users friends without consent and gave Netflix and Spotify the ability to read Facebook users private messages.

Additionally, the_Times_found, Facebook 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.

Facebook is a public trust that has broken our trust,wroteauthor and NBCpolitical analyst Anand Giridharadas in response to the_Times_ report. Mark Zuckerberg must resign now.

_The New Republic_s Jeet Heeradded, Facebook is evil, folks.

In addition to being invasive, former Federal Trade Commission (FTC) officials told the_Times_that Facebooks data-sharing partnerships with other corporate giants may also violate federal law.

This is just giving third parties permission to harvest data without you being informed of it or giving consent to it, said David Vladeck, former head of the FTCs consumer protection bureau. I dont understand how this unconsented-to data harvesting can at all be justified under the consent decree.

Roger McNamee, an early investor in Facebook, wholeheartedly agreed, declaring, I dont believe it is legitimate to enter into data-sharing partnerships where there is not prior informed consent from the user.

No one should trust Facebook until they change their business model, McNamee concluded.

Jake Johnson is a staff writer for Common Dreams.

First published in Truth Out, 19 December 2018.