NEW YORK (AP) — Facebook’s No. 2 executive says the company should have conducted an audit after learning that a political consultancy improperly accessed user data nearly three years ago.
Chief Operating Officer Sheryl Sandberg told NBC’s “Today” show that at the time, Facebook received legal assurances that Cambridge Analytica had deleted the improperly obtained information.
“What we didn’t do is the next step of an audit and we’re trying to that now,” she said.
The audit of Cambridge Analytica is on hold, in deference to a U.K. investigation. But Facebook has been conducting a broader review of its own practices and how other third-party apps use data.
The company is facing a global backlash over the improper data-sharing scandal. Hearings over the issue are scheduled in the U.S., and the European Union is considering what actions to take against the company.
Sandberg gave several interviews this week as Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg prepares to testify before Congress next week. The company is also facing an investigation by the Federal Trade Commission in what’s become its worst privacy crisis in its 14-year history.
It started with revelations that Cambridge Analytica, a data-mining firm, improperly accessed the private information of tens of millions of users to try to influence elections around the world. Over the past three weeks the scandal continued to spiral. For one, Facebook executives took nearly five days to respond to the Cambridge Analytica reports.
Then, some users who logged in to Facebook through Android devices discovered that Facebook had been collecting information about phone calls they made and text messages they sent. Facebook also acknowledged this week that nearly all of its 2.2 billion users may have had their public data scraped by “malicious actors” it did not name.
And Facebook hasn’t yet initiated a massive Cambridge Analytica-killing lawsuit why, exactly?
And then there’s this…,
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-04-04/facebook-scans-what-you-send-to-other-people-on-messenger-app
Facebook Inc. scans the links and images that people send each other on Facebook Messenger, and…
Thereby assuring that the company retains influence with emerging political talent.
Who has time to conduct audits… we’re too busy counting our profits.
Instead they put people on-site to make sure they could make the best use of the mountains of data they had.
I just read this morning about their recent attempt to collaborate with big hospitals. The idea, I think, was to “anonymize” patient data - taking out e.g. names - but leave enough identifying information to allow facebook to hash the info with their existing user profiles. Hospitals wouldn’t technically be violating HIPPA, but facebook would still be able to match patent data to their existing data sets and flag ones that didn’t seem to have nearby family, actively supporting community, and so on, so they could be targeted for nurse visits of other follow up upon discharge.
Nice idea, but there’s already a low-tech procedure for that - ask the fucking patient.
Apparently, in the initial discussions about this proposed end-run around HIPPA, patient privacy concerns didn’t even come up.