19 Dec 2025 Search

Look, Mark Zuckerberg wasn’t grown in a vat with genetically engineered surveillance and fraud powers. The reason that Meta has the capacity to perpetrate so many scams in the first place is because marketers choose to pass customer data to them, and that data feeds Meta’s surveillance advertising ML system, which matches scammers to likely victims while making fraud harder to spot for regulators, researchers, and the brands whose trademarks get infringed.

The fraud problem is not just Meta’s fraud problem. Yes, Meta made a lot of criminal choices, including a choice to facilitate massive fraud from China (where regular people aren’t allowed on Meta sites and apps but companies are allowed to make ad accounts), but the underlying cause of Meta’s fraud crisis is a series of decisions made at other companies to put their own customers at risk.

Using Meta Pixel, CAPI, SDKs, and Custom Audiences, knowing that Meta will use the data to train machine learning systems to perpetrate fraud, is not just giving up customer data, it’s an attack on your customers, your neighbors, and your country.

Some countries might be out ahead on the problem. It looks like Austria is in for a security and economic win, if the Austria’s highest court prohibits Meta Platforms’ business model story holds up. If people who use Meta sites and apps in Austria will be able to turn off the personalized advertising, that means not just a safer online environment, but more revenue for legitimate businesses. In the USA, though, we don’t have a law like the GDPR that Meta violated in the EU. What we do have are other helpful laws like the California Invasion of Privacy Act, which fraud victims here will be able to use to protect themselves—by taking action against the firms that pass data to Meta and put everyone at risk.