FTC Probing Facebook for Use of Personal Data, Source Says(bloomberg.com)
bloomberg.com
FTC Probing Facebook for Use of Personal Data, Source Says
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-03-20/ftc-said-to-be-probing-facebook-for-use-of-personal-data
371 comments
To any engineers reading this who are now working at Facebook, you have a choice to make:
Stay in the organization and work to turn it away form casual misuse of personal information. Prevent an Orwellian future of machine-learning assisted, personally targeted messaging preying upon our fears and insecurities. Stand up and speak out against the performance of unethical psychological experiments on unwitting participants.
-OR-
Leave now.
This is one of the important moral issues of our time. To stay on the sidelines is unacceptable.
Stay in the organization and work to turn it away form casual misuse of personal information. Prevent an Orwellian future of machine-learning assisted, personally targeted messaging preying upon our fears and insecurities. Stand up and speak out against the performance of unethical psychological experiments on unwitting participants.
-OR-
Leave now.
This is one of the important moral issues of our time. To stay on the sidelines is unacceptable.
Let us please remember that these incidents are not specific to Facebook, rather they are systemic to the big five.
A couple of years or more I was posting on Facebook regarding Cambridge Analytica's practices and was considered a tin foil hat and crazy.
No the reason I was able to shed some light at the time was I knew exactly how we could utilize the Facebook API back then to elicit the kind of data we are talking about, and completely legally. Nobody needed to circumvent FB API policies, it was yours for the taking.
I didn't do it although I did put together multiple PoC's from 2011 to 2014 to see what was possible and it was bad.
Another thing we should remember is that Cambridge Analytica is just one small tip of a fractal iceberg whose body is Facebook and the big five, your internet connection and certainly your smartphone themselves.
Google, Apple and Amazon are no less culpable in this regard.
The question now becomes which side of history we want to be on.
Another question is we assume we want to take our privacy back and how we do that with consent and assurance.
I don't have a Facebook account anymore but I'm still tracked as we all are. My mother doesn't like me not being there but a small price to pay. I can contact her elsewhere and do.
Surely enough is enough?
I think it is time to look for broad scale technologies that are better both in the real world and in our private world.
A couple of years or more I was posting on Facebook regarding Cambridge Analytica's practices and was considered a tin foil hat and crazy.
No the reason I was able to shed some light at the time was I knew exactly how we could utilize the Facebook API back then to elicit the kind of data we are talking about, and completely legally. Nobody needed to circumvent FB API policies, it was yours for the taking.
I didn't do it although I did put together multiple PoC's from 2011 to 2014 to see what was possible and it was bad.
Another thing we should remember is that Cambridge Analytica is just one small tip of a fractal iceberg whose body is Facebook and the big five, your internet connection and certainly your smartphone themselves.
Google, Apple and Amazon are no less culpable in this regard.
The question now becomes which side of history we want to be on.
Another question is we assume we want to take our privacy back and how we do that with consent and assurance.
I don't have a Facebook account anymore but I'm still tracked as we all are. My mother doesn't like me not being there but a small price to pay. I can contact her elsewhere and do.
Surely enough is enough?
I think it is time to look for broad scale technologies that are better both in the real world and in our private world.
It's laughable that any Facebook user assumes any degree of privacy.
What's far more concerning, and what this probe doesn't appear to address, is what Facebook does with the information of non-users.
https://fieldguide.gizmodo.com/all-the-ways-facebook-tracks-...
https://www.wordstream.com/blog/ws/2016/06/02/facebook-ads-f...
What's far more concerning, and what this probe doesn't appear to address, is what Facebook does with the information of non-users.
https://fieldguide.gizmodo.com/all-the-ways-facebook-tracks-...
https://www.wordstream.com/blog/ws/2016/06/02/facebook-ads-f...
Prediction: Facebook's goal for this investigation will be to make sure the public doesn't learn that Cambridge Analytica was only one of countless political actors that "somehow gained access" the pool of user information.
I was in meetings with FB almost 10 years ago, as the OpenGraph API was being implemented, where they were openly selling, to anyone willing to pay, exactly what CA supposedly "hacked their way into".
I was in meetings with FB almost 10 years ago, as the OpenGraph API was being implemented, where they were openly selling, to anyone willing to pay, exactly what CA supposedly "hacked their way into".
To put the FB selloff into a market perspective:
-Equifax is only off 13% from its peak after its unprecedented leak of nearly every American and many Canadians' credit info, leaving the population vulnerable to identity theft. The population mostly never agreed to give Equifax this information, but Equifax collects it anyways.
FB is off 8.5% now as a client business failed to adhere to FB users' privacy for data that the users were willingly giving out to FB and the client (but not the third party). Not likely much more downside to the stock on this news imo.
FB is off 8.5% now as a client business failed to adhere to FB users' privacy for data that the users were willingly giving out to FB and the client (but not the third party). Not likely much more downside to the stock on this news imo.
Biggest concern for Facebook has got to be them investigating the other sharing of data beyond Cambridge Analytica. I seriously doubt they turned the other way for conservative but not liberal think tanks / firms.
In the long term we need HIPAA style regulation for all kinds of personal data: friend graphs, behavioral histories, private messages, and especially things like location data or voice assistant audio samples.
Leak such data without explicit customer consent? That will be $10,000 per incident. So if you leak 100 data points of someone's location history that will be a $1,000,000 fine.
Explicit consent must be per-incident as in "YES I give my consent to send this information to <recipient> for purpose of <...>."
That would incentivize strong security practices and even more importantly dis-incentivize data hoarding beyond what is needed to provide a service. Hoarded personal data would be a gigantic risk and liability.
Leak such data without explicit customer consent? That will be $10,000 per incident. So if you leak 100 data points of someone's location history that will be a $1,000,000 fine.
Explicit consent must be per-incident as in "YES I give my consent to send this information to <recipient> for purpose of <...>."
That would incentivize strong security practices and even more importantly dis-incentivize data hoarding beyond what is needed to provide a service. Hoarded personal data would be a gigantic risk and liability.
I expect that FB will be receiving a few milliong letters like this [1] in a couple of months, when GDPR will be kicking in. And following that, a few million requests (smaller number) for the "right to be forgotten" [2].
#1 was on the front page of HN a couple of days ago.
[1]: https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/nightmare-letter-subject-acce...
[2]: https://gdpr-info.com/the-right-to-be-forgotten/
#1 was on the front page of HN a couple of days ago.
[1]: https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/nightmare-letter-subject-acce...
[2]: https://gdpr-info.com/the-right-to-be-forgotten/
The focus of this scandal is curious. Does anyone seriously expect privacy for information that they willingly share with hundreds of people (their facebook friends)?
If you think this kind of information floating around is damaging to society, then you're making an argument against the very idea of FB. Fine; it's at least worth thinking about how social media is changing our society. But to really be upset that this data is out there and being used, after willingly sharing it with many people, is kind of ridiculous. What did you expect? You should assume that anything you do on FB, short of private messages, is part of the public record.
Everyone is targeting you based on information you put out in the world. Every major political campaign in the US works with a database of voters that includes party affiliation, past turnout, name, age, etc. They can also fold in the same data that advertisers use. Being a good citizen of a republic—and a savvy consumer—in the modern world means thinking critically about who is trying to persuade you and what their agenda is. The government cannot protect you from persuasion.
If you think this kind of information floating around is damaging to society, then you're making an argument against the very idea of FB. Fine; it's at least worth thinking about how social media is changing our society. But to really be upset that this data is out there and being used, after willingly sharing it with many people, is kind of ridiculous. What did you expect? You should assume that anything you do on FB, short of private messages, is part of the public record.
Everyone is targeting you based on information you put out in the world. Every major political campaign in the US works with a database of voters that includes party affiliation, past turnout, name, age, etc. They can also fold in the same data that advertisers use. Being a good citizen of a republic—and a savvy consumer—in the modern world means thinking critically about who is trying to persuade you and what their agenda is. The government cannot protect you from persuasion.
I love how now this issue is alright to talk about on hacker news. For some reason when it was happening and all of the alarms were going off, it was banned content on hacker news. Technology is inherently political with political ramifications. -_-
Facebook is just one target right now. Working in ad tech, you know how many data brokers are available and how much information your phone and apps, regardless of OS, leaks real time personal data. The issue is with the ad tech industry as a whole.
Wait a minute.....
Wasn't the FTC already "monitoring" Facebook?
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/ftc-to-monitor-facebook-for-20-...
Oh, that's right. That whole monitoring for 20 years thing, that they're also applying to Google and a few other companies is a complete joke. If anything, it has become almost a badge of honor/certification thing - like "Look, the FTC is monitoring us for 20 years, so that obviously means we can't possibly abuse your data or do anything nefarious with it!"
Wasn't the FTC already "monitoring" Facebook?
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/ftc-to-monitor-facebook-for-20-...
Oh, that's right. That whole monitoring for 20 years thing, that they're also applying to Google and a few other companies is a complete joke. If anything, it has become almost a badge of honor/certification thing - like "Look, the FTC is monitoring us for 20 years, so that obviously means we can't possibly abuse your data or do anything nefarious with it!"
"...50 million users..."
Anyone know how this number was added up? Any reason not to believe it wasn't 500 million or 5 million?
Anyone know how this number was added up? Any reason not to believe it wasn't 500 million or 5 million?
Facebook is a net negative force in our society. Particularly for the startup ecosystem.
Disclaimer: I'm anti-democracy in it's current form so before you down vote me think through my point carefully.
What I don't get about this whole issue, is that we are basically admitting that the average person who uses these services has poor critical thinking skills and the American democratic process is easily gamed as such. I feel we are trying to fix the wrong thing. Sure, regulate FB and any other company that happens to collect lots of user data I don't have a problem with that. My fundamental issue is that FB is mostly an opt-in service. As far as I can see, the shadow profiles they create on a user who isn't signed up for their services doesn't really contain enough data to be of material impact for the type of things that a company like CA is doing (it's mostly to help in it's ad network to sell you more stuff rather and is rather well anonomyzed).
The only argument against the fact that FB is an opt-in service is that it has a near monopoly on social media and seems to either buy or kill any serious threat. More important than trying to regulate FB's data collection and privacy would be ensuring that our antitrust and monopoly laws are being enforced to remove FB's near monopoly.
Further, I'm not here to defend Facebook, but I feel it's being used as a scapegoat for an easily gamed democratic process where rather than biting the bullet and fixing that, we are saying it's FB and CA are the real evil here. In fact they are not. They are for-profit businesses who are operating within the current regulatory framework they've been provided. It seems obvious to me what really needs to be fixed is a broken electoral process.
What I don't get about this whole issue, is that we are basically admitting that the average person who uses these services has poor critical thinking skills and the American democratic process is easily gamed as such. I feel we are trying to fix the wrong thing. Sure, regulate FB and any other company that happens to collect lots of user data I don't have a problem with that. My fundamental issue is that FB is mostly an opt-in service. As far as I can see, the shadow profiles they create on a user who isn't signed up for their services doesn't really contain enough data to be of material impact for the type of things that a company like CA is doing (it's mostly to help in it's ad network to sell you more stuff rather and is rather well anonomyzed).
The only argument against the fact that FB is an opt-in service is that it has a near monopoly on social media and seems to either buy or kill any serious threat. More important than trying to regulate FB's data collection and privacy would be ensuring that our antitrust and monopoly laws are being enforced to remove FB's near monopoly.
Further, I'm not here to defend Facebook, but I feel it's being used as a scapegoat for an easily gamed democratic process where rather than biting the bullet and fixing that, we are saying it's FB and CA are the real evil here. In fact they are not. They are for-profit businesses who are operating within the current regulatory framework they've been provided. It seems obvious to me what really needs to be fixed is a broken electoral process.
Why don’t they just offer the option to turn off ads? If there’s no ads to show to you because you’re paying to opt out, there should be no reason to harvest your personal info. They have 2 billion active users and make around $50 billion a year. So they’d need to charge $2 per user per month to opt out of ads (and could probably charge more). The fact that this isn’t even an option just reeks of their holier than thou corporate attitude.
I don't know where else to say this so i'll say it here as it's relavant.
Is there not a way to have a browser extension that would scramble the meta data that is read by websits lik Facebook and Google? so we would still be feeding data to their brain but it would be worthless and random gibbrish. Does that make any snse?
Is there not a way to have a browser extension that would scramble the meta data that is read by websits lik Facebook and Google? so we would still be feeding data to their brain but it would be worthless and random gibbrish. Does that make any snse?
I'm somewhat surprised by the amount of criticism levied at Facebook here. Consider the following:
1) Both Android and iOS allow apps to access your contacts, which in aggregate is more or less the same kind of social graph that Facebook has. If you happen to be in someone else's contacts, you don't get a say here either. I suppose Facebook's data is richer in some ways, but not in other ways.
2) When Twitter removed API access for 3rd parties, there was an uproar in the developer community about how evil this is and so on. There's a trade-off here - openness at the platform level necessarily means less privacy for users.
3) A lot of the criticism Facebook has received in the past (both here and elsewhere) had to do with not allowing 3rd party developers to do more and hoarding user data, which is not theirs, for monetization. Here Facebook was explicitly giving the app owner and the user the power to decide - the app owner could ask and the user could either accept or decline. You could argue that this isn't adequate protection, but consider how this works for other platforms such as Windows, Mac OS, iOS and Android. Apps can access more or less everything and permission dialogs, even where they do exist, aren't taken seriously by the user.
4) Most publishers that are currently publishing these articles criticizing Facebook are also selling everything they know about you to marketers, often more explicitly for the purposes of targeting. The "scandal" here is that a third-party app gathered personal information that wasn't supposed to be used for targeting and the data ended up being used for targeted political ads. Most publishers have no problem explicitly selling whatever data they can get on you to these centralized data brokers who will sell that data to anyone.
5) All this talk about privacy and data aside, the motivation seems to be that the wrong guy won the presidential election - I don't see anyone whose personal data was supposedly used in this manner being upset nor anyone owning up to the fact that they were falsely manipulated into voting for Trump or not voting. It seems to be mainly Clinton supporters being upset that other people were manipulated into voting for the wrong guy, amplified by the same concern about privacy and social graph data ownership issue we've always had.
6) If we accept that it's the presidential election result that most people are upset about here, the media is even more culpable, both from creating this false narrative that it was not a close election and prematurely taking the moral high ground against the potential Clinton administration by focusing on the irrelevant stuff (emails, etc). And that's just the "mainstream" media, before we get to Fox News, etc.
1) Both Android and iOS allow apps to access your contacts, which in aggregate is more or less the same kind of social graph that Facebook has. If you happen to be in someone else's contacts, you don't get a say here either. I suppose Facebook's data is richer in some ways, but not in other ways.
2) When Twitter removed API access for 3rd parties, there was an uproar in the developer community about how evil this is and so on. There's a trade-off here - openness at the platform level necessarily means less privacy for users.
3) A lot of the criticism Facebook has received in the past (both here and elsewhere) had to do with not allowing 3rd party developers to do more and hoarding user data, which is not theirs, for monetization. Here Facebook was explicitly giving the app owner and the user the power to decide - the app owner could ask and the user could either accept or decline. You could argue that this isn't adequate protection, but consider how this works for other platforms such as Windows, Mac OS, iOS and Android. Apps can access more or less everything and permission dialogs, even where they do exist, aren't taken seriously by the user.
4) Most publishers that are currently publishing these articles criticizing Facebook are also selling everything they know about you to marketers, often more explicitly for the purposes of targeting. The "scandal" here is that a third-party app gathered personal information that wasn't supposed to be used for targeting and the data ended up being used for targeted political ads. Most publishers have no problem explicitly selling whatever data they can get on you to these centralized data brokers who will sell that data to anyone.
5) All this talk about privacy and data aside, the motivation seems to be that the wrong guy won the presidential election - I don't see anyone whose personal data was supposedly used in this manner being upset nor anyone owning up to the fact that they were falsely manipulated into voting for Trump or not voting. It seems to be mainly Clinton supporters being upset that other people were manipulated into voting for the wrong guy, amplified by the same concern about privacy and social graph data ownership issue we've always had.
6) If we accept that it's the presidential election result that most people are upset about here, the media is even more culpable, both from creating this false narrative that it was not a close election and prematurely taking the moral high ground against the potential Clinton administration by focusing on the irrelevant stuff (emails, etc). And that's just the "mainstream" media, before we get to Fox News, etc.
If we’re going to go this route, Google should be hauled in first. You can easily choose not to play with Facebook. Google? Not so much.
Sincere question: It appears that it's crystal clear to everyone where the distinction between fake and real news lies, or who should be allowed to post (mis)information (serve ads, if you prefer) on the interwebs, or how to identify the culprits exhaustively. I fail to see a way in practice to draw the boundary and identify/persecute the offenders. Imho virtually all ads spread misinformation (push someone's agenda) to my detriment. My only means of resistance is inherent in my duty (civic, but also self-serving -- to keep my sanity) to consciously make the effort to seek/filter through multiple viewpoints.
Its simply astounding that the "use of personal data" is seemingly coming as a revelation to anyone. What's especially ridiculous is that arms of the government (like the FTC) are feigning indignation. The US government is - by far - the biggest collector and aggregator of personal data and information in the world. Both the government, corporations, "social media companies", and everyone else with access to data has been doing the same, and using this data to create models to influence people believe and support (or buy) whatever agenda or product that respective organization is pushing. Unfortunately this latest episode of faux outrage is very much like the faux outrage that has infected our cultural landscape for the last 18 months (due to Trump). Things that have been going on for decades are suddenly being attacked as evils unique to Trump. If the net result of this selective outrage led to substantive changes in our society, then perhaps it the outrage would be a "good" thing (despite its manufactured nature). Unfortunately, its very clear that all of these practices - the data mining, the troll farms, the bot-networks, the propaganda (both public and private) - will roll forward at full steam once Trump is consigned to the wastebin of history (where he belongs). Once the reigns of power are back into the hands of a trusted steward of global US military empire (rather than a deluded carnival barker) you should have absolutely no doubt that Comcast, and GE, and Disney will direct their minions in the media to focus your outrage somewhere else.
Reminds me of this quote from the tabbacco industry in the early 90s;
“We don't smoke that shit. We just sell it. We reserve the right to smoke for the young, the poor, the black and the stupid." - R.J. Reynolds executive’s reply when asked why he didn’t smoke
“We don't smoke that shit. We just sell it. We reserve the right to smoke for the young, the poor, the black and the stupid." - R.J. Reynolds executive’s reply when asked why he didn’t smoke
Ok. I know it's off-topic here, but...
Now what's good alternative to Facebook Messanger video calls? Signal doesn't support it - I read that it's in beta, but I can't enable it. Telegram doesn't seem to support it either. Skype is not an alternative.
Is Matrix/Riot good enough right now? For me it should work on Linux, Android and iOS for my family.
Now that I think about it, maybe I should setup some private WebRTC service for video calls. But it seems cumbersome for part of my family. However it probably would be easier for my parents and my in-laws.
EDIT: As Thriptic mentioned Signal indeed does support video calls. I failed to find the functionality, because I expected to see separate button for video call. One has to first start calling and then enable video.
Now what's good alternative to Facebook Messanger video calls? Signal doesn't support it - I read that it's in beta, but I can't enable it. Telegram doesn't seem to support it either. Skype is not an alternative.
Is Matrix/Riot good enough right now? For me it should work on Linux, Android and iOS for my family.
Now that I think about it, maybe I should setup some private WebRTC service for video calls. But it seems cumbersome for part of my family. However it probably would be easier for my parents and my in-laws.
EDIT: As Thriptic mentioned Signal indeed does support video calls. I failed to find the functionality, because I expected to see separate button for video call. One has to first start calling and then enable video.
I don't have much of an issue with targeted advertising or content by harvesting of data through what you make publicly available, as long as it is de-identified. It has plenty of applications for good as well. I hope that platforms are working on ways of taking these algorithms to edge nodes, making large master databases containing un-aggregated data that can be used to de-anonymise people less prevalent.
I'm more immediately concerned about blatantly fake news, clickbait, bots, sock-puppets and fake accounts posing as trusted parties in order to harvest trusted information and spread misinformation.
I'm more immediately concerned about blatantly fake news, clickbait, bots, sock-puppets and fake accounts posing as trusted parties in order to harvest trusted information and spread misinformation.
Isn't Facebook valuation is implicitly based on how Facebook can [ab]use personal data?
Ah, the other shoe drops. This is the reason for the blitz of anti-Facebook stories all at once... Legal authority to examine all that juicy personal data Facebook holds.
And if you think you are safe because you don't have an account, I have bad news for you.
And if you think you are safe because you don't have an account, I have bad news for you.
[deleted]
We see companies doing this all the time and I hope there's some sort of fix here, but I'm curious about the individual to individual implications. If we're serious about fixing privacy then things like sharing private messages, doxxing, etc should be addressed as well imho. Not sure what that would look like without curtailing free speech however.
At a previous employer we had a high up executive from Facebook come out to give a presentation.
One of my main take away was that one of FBs big goals was to build a 'knowledge economy'. It struck me as a bit of an odd objective at the time, but I think I am now starting to understand what this means (and it's a little scary).
One of my main take away was that one of FBs big goals was to build a 'knowledge economy'. It struck me as a bit of an odd objective at the time, but I think I am now starting to understand what this means (and it's a little scary).
The amount of data being amassed by Facebook, Google and others has become exorbitant, and apparently has already been abused (some might even say weaponized) in a major election.
If Facebook indeed violated the 2011 consent decree, then the FTC can fine them up to "thousands of dollars a day per violation [per user]". This presents the FTC with the opportunity to send a message to these data hoarders: protect the data you collect, or else.
Fine them to the point where they have to start asking themselves whether it's even worth it to collect and store certain data, and with whom to share it.
It shouldn't be the government's job to ensure that the data gets protected, this should be in Facebook's own self interest.