A Series Of Recent Events And Privacy Snafus At Facebook Cause Multiple Concerns. Does Facebook Deserve Users' Data?

So much has happened lately at Facebook that it can be difficult to keep up with the data scandals, data breaches, privacy fumbles, and more at the global social service. To help, below is a review of recent events.

The the New York Times reported on Tuesday, December 18th that for years:

"... Facebook gave some of the world’s largest technology companies more intrusive access to users’ personal data than it has disclosed, effectively exempting those business partners from its usual privacy rules... The special arrangements are detailed in hundreds of pages of Facebook documents obtained by The New York Times. The records, generated in 2017 by the company’s internal system for tracking partnerships, provide the most complete picture yet of the social network’s data-sharing practices... Facebook allowed Microsoft’s 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. The social network 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..."

According to the Reuters newswire, a Netflix spokesperson denied that Netflix accessed Facebook users' private messages, nor asked for that access. Facebook responded with denials the same day:

"... none of these partnerships or features gave companies access to information without people’s permission, nor did they violate our 2012 settlement with the FTC... most of these features are now gone. We shut down instant personalization, which powered Bing’s features, in 2014 and we wound down our partnerships with device and platform companies months ago, following an announcement in April. Still, we recognize that we’ve needed tighter management over how partners and developers can access information using our APIs. We’re already in the process of reviewing all our APIs and the partners who can access them."

Needed tighter management with its partners and developers? That's an understatement. During March and April of 2018 we learned that bad actors posed as researchers and used both quizzes and automated tools to vacuum up (and allegedly resell later) profile data for 87 million Facebook users. There's more news about this breach. The Office of the Attorney General for Washington, DC announced on December 19th that it has:

"... sued Facebook, Inc. for failing to protect its users’ data... In its lawsuit, the Office of the Attorney General (OAG) alleges Facebook’s lax oversight and misleading privacy settings allowed, among other things, a third-party application to use the platform to harvest the personal information of millions of users without their permission and then sell it to a political consulting firm. In the run-up to the 2016 presidential election, some Facebook users downloaded a “personality quiz” app which also collected data from the app users’ Facebook friends without their knowledge or consent. The app’s developer then sold this data to Cambridge Analytica, which used it to help presidential campaigns target voters based on their personal traits. Facebook took more than two years to disclose this to its consumers. OAG is seeking monetary and injunctive relief, including relief for harmed consumers, damages, and penalties to the District."

Sadly, there's still more. Facebook announced on December 14th another data breach:

"Our internal team discovered a photo API bug that may have affected people who used Facebook Login and granted permission to third-party apps to access their photos. We have fixed the issue but, because of this bug, some third-party apps may have had access to a broader set of photos than usual for 12 days between September 13 to September 25, 2018... the bug potentially gave developers access to other photos, such as those shared on Marketplace or Facebook Stories. The bug also impacted photos that people uploaded to Facebook but chose not to post... we believe this may have affected up to 6.8 million users and up to 1,500 apps built by 876 developers... Early next week we will be rolling out tools for app developers that will allow them to determine which people using their app might be impacted by this bug. We will be working with those developers to delete the photos from impacted users. We will also notify the people potentially impacted..."

We believe? That sounds like Facebook doesn't know for sure. Where was the quality assurance (QA) team on this? Who is performing the post-breach investigation to determine what happened so it doesn't happen again? This post-breach response seems sloppy. And, the "bug" description seems disingenuous. Anytime persons -- in this case developers -- have access to data they shouldn't have, it is a data breach.

One quickly gets the impression that Facebook has created so many niches, apps, APIs, and special arrangements for developers and advertisers that it really can't manage nor control the data it collects about its users. That implies Facebook users aren't in control of their data, either.

There were other notable stumbles. There were reports after many users experienced repeated bogus Friend Requests, due to hacked and/or cloned accounts. It can be difficult for users to distinguish valid Friend Requests from spammers or bad actors masquerading as friends.

In August, reports surfaced that Facebook approached several major banks offering to share its detailed financial information about consumers in order, "to boost user engagement." Reportedly, the detailed financial information included debit/credit/prepaid card transactions and checking account balances. Not good.

Also in August, Facebook's Onavo VPN App was removed from the Apple App store because the app violated data-collection policies. 9 To 5 Mac reported on December 5th:

"The UK parliament has today publicly shared secret internal Facebook emails that cover a wide-range of the company’s tactics related to its free iOS VPN app that was used as spyware, recording users’ call and text message history, and much more... Onavo was an interesting effort from Facebook. It posed as a free VPN service/app labeled as Facebook’s “Protect” feature, but was more or less spyware designed to collect data from users that Facebook could leverage..."

Why spy? Why the deception? This seems unnecessary for a global social networking company already collecting massive amounts of content.

In November, an investigative report by ProPublica detailed the failures in Facebook's news transparency implementation. The failures mean Facebook hasn't made good on its promises to ensure trustworthy news content, nor stop foreign entities from using the social service to meddle in elections in democratic countries.

There is more. Facebook disclosed in October a massive data breach affecting 30 million users (emphasis added):

For 15 million people, attackers accessed two sets of information – name and contact details (phone number, email, or both, depending on what people had on their profiles). For 14 million people, the attackers accessed the same two sets of information, as well as other details people had on their profiles. This included username, gender, locale/language, relationship status, religion, hometown, self-reported current city, birth date, device types used to access Facebook, education, work, the last 10 places they checked into or were tagged in, website, people or Pages they follow, and the 15 most recent searches..."

The stolen data allows bad actors to operate several types of attacks (e.g., spam, phishing, etc.) against Facebook users. The stolen data allows foreign spy agencies to collect useful information to target persons. Neither is good. Wired summarized the situation:

"Every month this year—and in some months, every week—new information has come out that makes it seem as if Facebook's big rethink is in big trouble... Well-known and well-regarded executives, like the founders of Facebook-owned Instagram, Oculus, and WhatsApp, have left abruptly. And more and more current and former employees are beginning to question whether Facebook's management team, which has been together for most of the last decade, is up to the task.

Technically, Zuckerberg controls enough voting power to resist and reject any moves to remove him as CEO. But the number of times that he and his number two Sheryl Sandberg have over-promised and under-delivered since the 2016 election would doom any other management team... Meanwhile, investigations in November revealed, among other things, that the company had hired a Washington firm to spread its own brand of misinformation on other platforms..."

Hiring a firm to distribute misinformation elsewhere while promising to eliminate misinformation on its platform. Not good. Are Zuckerberg and Sandberg up to the task? The above list of breaches, scandals, fumbles, and stumbles suggest not. What do you think?

The bottom line is trust. Given recent events, BuzzFeed News article posed a relevant question (emphasis added):

"Of all of the statements, apologies, clarifications, walk-backs, defenses, and pleas uttered by Facebook employees in 2018, perhaps the most inadvertently damning came from its CEO, Mark Zuckerberg. Speaking from a full-page ad displayed in major papers across the US and Europe, Zuckerberg proclaimed, "We have a responsibility to protect your information. If we can’t, we don’t deserve it." At the time, the statement was a classic exercise in damage control. But given the privacy blunders that followed, it hasn’t aged well. In fact, it’s become an archetypal criticism of Facebook and the set up for its existential question: Why, after all that’s happened in 2018, does Facebook deserve our personal information?"

Facebook executives have apologized often. Enough is enough. No more apologies. Just fix it! And, if Facebook users haven't asked themselves the above question yet, some surely will. Earlier this week, a friend posted on the site:

"To all my FB friends:
I will be deleting my FB account very soon as I am disgusted by their invasion of the privacy of their users. Please contact me by email in the future. Please note that it will take several days for this action to take effect as FB makes it hard to get out of its grip. Merry Christmas to all and with best wishes for a Healthy, safe, and invasive free New Year."

I reminded this friend to also delete any Instagram and What's App accounts, since Facebook operates those services, too. If you want to quit the service but suffer with FOMO (Fear Of Missing Out), then read the experiences of a person who quit Apple, Google, Facebook, Microsoft, and Amazon for a month. It can be done. And, your social life will continue -- spectacularly. It did before Facebook.

Me? I have reduced my activity on Facebook. And there are certain activities I don't do on Facebook: take quizzes, make online payments, use its emotion reaction buttons (besides "Like"), use its mobile app, use the Messenger mobile app, nor use its voting and ballot previews content. Long ago I disabled the Facebook API platform on my Facebook account. You should, too. I never use my Facebook credentials (e.g., username, password) to sign into other sites. Never.

I will continue to post on Facebook links to posts in this blog, since it is helpful information for many Facebook users. In what ways have you reduced your usage of Facebook?

Comments

[Diane Simpson]

I have reduced my use of Facebook by never being on it, which I am supremely glad about after reading this blog post. I also got off LinkedIn after receiving a notice about a class action lawsuit that was prompted by LinkedIn's sending out messages under people's names (with their photo) asking other people to join the social media site, without the user's knowledge or consent.

[emma williams]

Hello
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[George]

Diane and Emma:

Thanks for sharing your comments and for the kind words. The good and bad news: there's plenty to blog about currently. I look forward to hearing more of your comments.

George
Editor

[Johnson]

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