In recent months, Facebook has dealt with mounting pressure from lawmakers and privacy advocates to submit itself to government regulation. Some prominent leaders, including presidential candidates like Elizabeth Warren, have even advocated for the company to be broken up under antitrust laws. All of this, critics say, is because of Facebook’s treatment of user data and privacy. However, one former Facebook executive came to the company’s defense this week, stating that he felt the social media giant has gotten a raw deal.

Chris Kelly, the first general counsel at Facebook and a current stakeholder, told CNBC that since Facebook is one of the biggest and most visible tech companies to collect user data, it has taken the brunt of public anger on the issue.

“Because Facebook got to the scale it got, they ended up being the boogeyman on privacy in particular,” Kelly said in an interview with CNBC. “But what we really had was a change from a relatively unrecorded world where you could always manipulate how you wanted to see your life, and now there’s a record over time.”

While it’s true that Facebook is just one company that possesses far too much of our information, that also isn’t a satisfactory defense. Just because everyone else is doing it doesn’t make Facebook’s privacy practices any better.

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