The leaked documents are the latest to emerge from Facebook's legal battle with Six4Three, the developer of the defunct app for searching out bikini-clad photos on the platform. The set of documents, by design, tells only one side of the story and omits important context." Responding to the allegations, a Facebook spokesperson said in a statement that "As we've said many times, Six4Three - creators of the Pikinis app -cherry-picked these documents from years ago as part of a lawsuit to force Facebook to share information on friends of the app's users. "In contrast with Facebook’s public statements, the company came up with several ways to require third-party applications to compensate Facebook for access to its users’ data, including direct payment, advertising spending and data-sharing arrangements." The company also looked at restricting access to data for companies it viewed as a competitive threat. The NBC investigation cited Amazon as an example where Facebook provided access to user data in return for advertising dollars on its platforms. And this was made much worse because "a ll the while, Facebook was formulating a strategy to publicly frame these moves as a way of protecting user privacy." The picture painted is of a network of friendly tech giants conceiving of ways to commercialize the information gleaned from users on social media in an entirely non-transparent way. In the separate revelations that Facebook had been leveraging user data as a currency, leaked documents appear to show that the company was prepared to trade away user data when it perceived there to be a commercial advantage. "But the facts are clear," the emailed statement claimed, "we've never sold people's data." Really? Isn't commercializing user data the company's core business model? People can also review and manage the contacts they share with Facebook in their settings." We've fixed the underlying issue and are notifying people whose contacts were imported. "These contacts were not shared with anyone and we're deleting them. "We estimate that up to 1.5 million people's email contacts may have been uploaded," the company said. The number of people affected by this is not insignificant. 'Unintentional' harvesting of user data without consent comes as an awkward time for a company under increasing scrutiny over its approach to securing and maintaining the security of its users. When we looked into the steps people were going through to verify their accounts we found that in some cases people's email contacts were also unintentionally uploaded to Facebook when they created their account." Now, in this latest privacy breach, Facebook has confirmed that "last month we stopped offering email password verification as an option for people verifying their account when signing up for Facebook for the first time. storing them in a readable format within its internal data storage systems." This resulted in the passwords being searchable by employees. Last month, Facebook "admitted exposing passwords belonging to hundreds of millions of users. In other cases, it would deny user-data access to rival companies or apps." On Tuesday, NBC reported that it had leaked documents showing that "Mark Zuckerberg leveraged Facebook user data to fight rivals and help friends." The 4,000 pages of internal documents implicated Zuckerberg as well as Facebook's board and senior management in finding "ways to tap Facebook’s trove of user data - including information about friends, relationships and photos - as leverage over companies it partnered with. In some cases, Facebook would reward favored companies by giving them access to the data of its users. This is the second data scandal to hit the company this week. If the company was prepared to download contacts without permission, why would it not also metadata tag email content inside those third-party services for commercial advertising purposes? And yet it's Facebook that has lost significant user trust in recent months. The irony is that this concern will be dismissed because it's Facebook with the company's unique scale and reach. Forgetting the contact details that were then harvested, such a security breach would have left the email content itself open to misuse. In addition to the obvious data misuse implications, for a commercial platform to request a password for a separate application breaks every security protocol imaginable.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |