ZUCK KNEW: Documents Reveal Facebook Was Informed App Could Sell Private User Data

 Documents reveal Facebook was informed private user data, collected by a third party app, could be sold. 

FT reports:

Facebook was informed that the app at the centre of a massive data leak could sell user data to third parties, according to documents seen by the Financial Times, raising fresh questions about how the company protects its users’ data.  The social network was sent terms and conditions for the second version of the survey app, which pulled user data that was then leaked to Cambridge Analytica, the data analytics firm.

These contradicted Facebook’s own platform policies, according to Chris Wylie, the former Cambridge Analytica employee turned whistleblower. But the social network relied on an automated process to accept updates, so no employee at Facebook may have seen the app’s new policy, which disclosed that it could sell and transfer the data.  The first version of the app, which was reviewed by Facebook, said the opposite: it claimed to be a “research program” and said “users will be informed that the data will be carefully protected and never used for commercial purposes”, the social network said.

Federal investigators have begun probing Facebook’s use of personal data after reports surfaced that Cambridge Analytica ‘improperly gained access to the data of more than 50 million users.’

CNBC reports:

The U.S. Federal Trade Commission is investigating whether the use of personal data from 50 million Facebook users by Cambridge Analytica violated a consent decree the tech company signed with the agency in 2011, Bloomberg reported Monday. […]

“We are aware of the issues that have been raised but cannot comment on whether we are investigating. We take any allegations of violations of our consent decrees very seriously as we did in 2012 in a privacy case involving Google,” a spokesman for the FTC said Tuesday. […]

“We reject any suggestion of violation of the consent decree. We respected the privacy settings that people had in place. Privacy and data protections are fundamental to every decision we make,” the social network giant said in a statement to the Washington Post over the weekend.

Judge Napolitano told the Fox Business Network that “Mark Zuckerberg’s statement.. is essentially an admission,” that Facebook allowed parties to improperly gain access to private user data.

Judge Napolitano: “Mark Zuckerberg’s statement, supplemented by Sheryl Sandberg’s is essentially an admission. That’s Exhibit 1 in the class action lawsuit against them. I think they’ll get some traction in terms of their shareholders of stock because they admitted the obvious that they allowed people that they didn’t trust to gain access to private information from those of us who did not authorize it.”

 

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