I am so pleased I totally deleted my FB page years ago.
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencet...ontents-private-Messenger-texts.html#comments
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencet...ontents-private-Messenger-texts.html#comments
Another FACEBOOK scandal
- Thread starter Silent Earth
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I'm pretty much going with the fact that everything is recorded now. All my voice phone calls, all my emails, even what I am typing here. All of it gets stored somewhere. Or at least filtered through some giant program searching for keywords and patterns, then some stored and some deleted. If you had enough memory, I suppose you could store all of it.
I started a Facebook account years ago, then lost the password and I don't have the email I signed up with.
It is still there. And I can't recover the account to delete it. Nothing stupid thankfully, but still. Lesson learned.
I started a Facebook account years ago, then lost the password and I don't have the email I signed up with.
It is still there. And I can't recover the account to delete it. Nothing stupid thankfully, but still. Lesson learned.
Could care less, don't put anything on Facebook or Messenger that I don't mind the world seeing. Simple as that.
It's simply too invaluable a tool for me NOT to use it. I can keep up on family that lives far away, old classmates and friends, and we can all still be in each others' lives.
I love being able to see their kids grow, and how all our lives change, etc. That's very valuable to me, so I'll simply go in knowing what the privacy expectation is.
It's simply too invaluable a tool for me NOT to use it. I can keep up on family that lives far away, old classmates and friends, and we can all still be in each others' lives.
I love being able to see their kids grow, and how all our lives change, etc. That's very valuable to me, so I'll simply go in knowing what the privacy expectation is.
As of sometime in the 90's, NOTHING is deleted anymore. Though plenty is archived enough to pretty much be out of filtration. You are not incorrect. Back when I was going for a career in the CIA (specifically, the FBIS (now absorbed into the NSA), we had some visibility to some of the programming used (grew out of an FBI project called Carnivore actually)...
Today's storage and analysis sites have technology that is above and beyond even the few quantum (like) computers in existence. It's pretty scary actually. Snowden definitely was a hero in my book, as he brought a lot of it into the open.
(If anyone's curious, the coup in Russia pretty much killed the student program I was in, so my CIA dreams went poof. Instead, we were advised to go into the military and would have papers to get us into the intel branch of either the Army or Navy, and go that route, so wasn't my cup of tea...had a health issue that would have prevented that...(then, though likely not now).
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.
Think twice about something for the metadata centers Arctic? LOL
There's really a lot of info out there on these and even the history of these data collection and analysis centers. Main reason the FBIS was dissolved and assimilated, is because humans were no longer needed in the role. (just human analysts to assess the filtered raw data results and chatter), but not for collection and filtration like the old days. It later became the OSC in the early 2000's (though the roles we were being trained for became an NSA program, but only for graduate level colleges). Same VA building (at least then). (I was in the program in the early 90's, and it was only for about 3 months before it all went to crap). I was still 3 more months away from going to VA. Oh well.
There's really a lot of info out there on these and even the history of these data collection and analysis centers. Main reason the FBIS was dissolved and assimilated, is because humans were no longer needed in the role. (just human analysts to assess the filtered raw data results and chatter), but not for collection and filtration like the old days. It later became the OSC in the early 2000's (though the roles we were being trained for became an NSA program, but only for graduate level colleges). Same VA building (at least then). (I was in the program in the early 90's, and it was only for about 3 months before it all went to crap). I was still 3 more months away from going to VA. Oh well.
Last edited:
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- Mar 29, 2013
- Messages
- 18,455
Some how my post got deleted. I think it's a conspiracy....dang data miners.
I deleted the Facebook app on my phone about a month ago. I haven’t missed it. I took the messenger app off the phone today after reading this article. Another previous article on this site and a radio show my husband listen too directed me to turn off my phone microphone and readjust my phone settings to turn off my location, GPS etc. I also deleted probably about 95 percent of my Facebook content. I don’t see myself using too much anymore.
No privacy with cell phones including texting and private messages with any platform like facebook. Nothing is ever said that I should be concerned with between with me and the wife. Personal matters stay with in the confinement of the four wall, we don't discuss things on the phone either by voice texting email and certainly don't use social media to discuss our private matters. Besides, the internet is a cesspool of drama queens especially facebook, even the politicians and news channels are emulating facebook drama queen society. Silicone valley perpetuated the current generational evolution we see today!
My wife has just discovered that her I phone trackers her every move including how far she has walked and records it, Talk about furious
No social media here. I had Faceplant for a while, but got fed up of whiny family members on the timeline thing.
I use whatsapp as it's a free message service, it was great chatting to my son when he was overseas in real time for nothing. I keep in touch with friends and family mambers with it too and as it's using phone numbers I control who I connect with.
I use whatsapp as it's a free message service, it was great chatting to my son when he was overseas in real time for nothing. I keep in touch with friends and family mambers with it too and as it's using phone numbers I control who I connect with.
Well said and 100 percent true.
You know Facebook owns WhatsApp
I’m still a hold out on facebook, never even went on it much less set up an account. I could see the attraction of connecting with old friends and family, but hey, I already spend enough time on this forum. I’d never get anything done if I had it too!
As far as privacy, as I said before, get over it. There is no privacy anymore. Follow the laws and you don’t have to worry about it. I am certain that with the cell phone we all carry, our smart tv’s, even the gps and computers in our cars, everything you do or where you go is recorded and stored somewhere. I don’t go with most govt conspiracy theories, but there is no such thing as privacy anymore.
As far as privacy, as I said before, get over it. There is no privacy anymore. Follow the laws and you don’t have to worry about it. I am certain that with the cell phone we all carry, our smart tv’s, even the gps and computers in our cars, everything you do or where you go is recorded and stored somewhere. I don’t go with most govt conspiracy theories, but there is no such thing as privacy anymore.
Yep. But it's nothing like faceplant. If they want to see what I'm writing, they're quite welcome, I've never had a problem with the privacy thing as all we do is noted anyway. I just don't want all the adverts and whiny relatives or suggestions. With Whatsapp I get to choose who I talk to as it's just an instant messaging service.
It never really attracted me, I joined to stay in touch with the odd relative I still talk to, but the rest piled in anyway.
Facebook says if you want privacy you will have to pay for it
http://www.foxnews.com/tech/2018/04...-expect-to-pay-for-privacy-sandberg-says.html
http://www.foxnews.com/tech/2018/04...-expect-to-pay-for-privacy-sandberg-says.html
Anything Facebook says ought to be taken with a grain salt, WhatsApp is entangled in the same binary as Facebook messenger
https://www.google.com/amp/s/amp.th...whatsapp-backlash-facebook-data-privacy-users
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- 18,449
I still have my FB account but rarely post, maybe once or twice a year. I really only have it to keep up with grandkids. If someone wants my info, they would see garden, critter and quilt projects. Maybe even what I ended up canning. That's about it. If I wanted to talk to people I went to HS with, I would have never lost contact with in the first place and I talk to family I want to talk with, but not on Social Media. Last year I checked in when my friend or her mom posted, just so I could keep up with her cancer progression. Now only look when DIL post a pic cause 9 out of 10 it's of my Sweet Pea.I
Can't understand the fascination of wanting everyone knowing every little aspect of ones lives. Is it a keeping up with the Jones type of mentality?
Can't understand the fascination of wanting everyone knowing every little aspect of ones lives. Is it a keeping up with the Jones type of mentality?
They want people to pay for privacy? Why would anyone pay them for privacy when they botched the job to begin with? Sanderberg also states that their will be more privacy breaches to come. She is certain the Cambridge was not the only incident. So there are going to be more privacy breaches discovered and you want me to pay you for privacy?...hmmmmm, no.
I deleted (not suspend) my facebook account, I don’t really post anything so no reason to have it. Besides, it’s another one of them California social engineering companies I just don’t want to be part of.
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- 10,004
New story on Drudge today. Didn't notice the source.
I tried to deactivate my fb account, but basically it just puts it on hold. All you have to finish out in your password and you are back on.
I described about a month ago. I do not miss it at all.
When people say, I don' want to see anything political, I have no time for people not wanting to know what's going on in the world except for their movies and lying about how wonderful their "soul mate" is.
I tried to deactivate my fb account, but basically it just puts it on hold. All you have to finish out in your password and you are back on.
I described about a month ago. I do not miss it at all.
When people say, I don' want to see anything political, I have no time for people not wanting to know what's going on in the world except for their movies and lying about how wonderful their "soul mate" is.
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- 10,004
The new story is in New York Times.
It's headlining on Drudge
It's headlining on Drudge
To leave FB can be done ( I hope) you have to follow certain steps in precise order then not access FB or FB linked site for four weeks or it automatically reactivate its.
This worked a while back
This worked a while back
- Joined
- Nov 27, 2015
- Messages
- 10,004
The 4 week period must be the important point. I keep getting emails saying that I can reactivate, blah, blah, blah,
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive...ebook-device-partners-users-friends-data.html
As Facebook sought to become the world’s dominant social media service, it struck agreements allowing phone and other device makers access to vast amounts of its users’ personal information.
Facebook has reached data-sharing partnerships with at least 60 device makers — including Apple, Amazon, BlackBerry, Microsoft and Samsung — over the last decade, starting before Facebook apps were widely available on smartphones, company officials said. The deals allowed Facebook to expand its reach and let device makers offer customers popular features of the social network, such as messaging, “like” buttons and address books.
But the partnerships, whose scope has not previously been reported, raise concerns about the company’s privacy protections and compliance with a 2011 consent decree with the Federal Trade Commission. Facebook allowed the device companies access to the data of users’ friends without their explicit consent, even after declaring that it would no longer share such information with outsiders. Some device makers could retrieve personal information even from users’ friends who believed they had barred any sharing, The New York Times found.
Most of the partnerships remain in effect, though Facebook began winding them down in April. The company came under intensifying scrutiny by lawmakers and regulators after news reports in March that a political consulting firm, Cambridge Analytica, misused the private information of tens of millions of Facebook users.
In the furor that followed, Facebook’s leaders said that the kind of access exploited by Cambridge in 2014 was cut off by the next year, when Facebook prohibited developers from collecting information from users’ friends. But the company officials did not disclose that Facebook had exempted the makers of cellphones, tablets and other hardware from such restrictions.
“You might think that Facebook or the device manufacturer is trustworthy,” said Serge Egelman, a privacy researcher at the University of California, Berkeley, who studies the security of mobile apps. “But the problem is that as more and more data is collected on the device — and if it can be accessed by apps on the device — it creates serious privacy and security risks.”
In interviews, Facebook officials defended the data sharing as consistent with its privacy policies, the F.T.C. agreement and pledges to users. They said its partnerships were governed by contracts that strictly limited use of the data, including any stored on partners’ servers. The officials added that they knew of no cases where the information had been misused.
The company views its device partners as extensions of Facebook, serving its more than two billion users, the officials said.
“These partnerships work very differently from the way in which app developers use our platform,” said Ime Archibong, a Facebook vice president. Unlike developers that provide games and services to Facebook users, the device partners can use Facebook data only to provide versions of “the Facebook experience,” the officials said.
Some device partners can retrieve Facebook users’ relationship status, religion, political leaning and upcoming events, among other data. Tests by The Times showed that the partners requested and received data in the same way other third parties did.
Facebook’s view that the device makers are not outsiders lets the partners go even further, The Times found: They can obtain data about a user’s Facebook friends, even those who have denied Facebook permission to share information with any third parties.
In interviews, several former Facebook software engineers and security experts said they were surprised at the ability to override sharing restrictions.
“It’s like having door locks installed, only to find out that the locksmith also gave keys to all of his friends so they can come in and rifle through your stuff without having to ask you for permission,” said Ashkan Soltani, a research and privacy consultant who formerly served as the F.T.C.’s chief technologist.
How One Phone Gains Access to Hundreds of Thousands of Facebook Accounts
ceGabriel J.X. Dance606 friendsof Mr. Dance
Michael LaForgia, a New York Times reporter, used the Hub app on a BlackBerry Z10 to log into Facebook.
After connecting to Facebook, the BlackBerry Hub app was able to retrieve detailed data on 556 of Mr. LaForgia's friends, including relationship status, religious and political leanings and events they planned to attend. Facebook has said that it cut off third parties' access to this type of information in 2015, but that it does not consider BlackBerry a third party in this case.
The Hub app was also able to access information — including unique identifiers — on 294,258 friends of Mr. LaForgia's friends.
By Rich Harris and Gabriel J.X. Dance
Details of Facebook’s partnerships have emerged amid a reckoning in Silicon Valley over the volume of personal information collected on the internet and monetized by the tech industry. The pervasive collection of data, while largely unregulated in the United States, has come under growing criticism from elected officials at home and overseas and provoked concern among consumers about how freely their information is shared.
In a tense appearance before Congress in March, Facebook’s chief executive, Mark Zuckerberg, emphasized what he said was a company priority for Facebook users.“Every piece of content that you share on Facebook you own,” he testified. ”You have complete control over who sees it and how you share it.”
But the device partnerships provoked discussion even within Facebook as early as 2012, according to Sandy Parakilas, who at the time led third-party advertising and privacy compliance for Facebook’s platform.
“This was flagged internally as a privacy issue,” said Mr. Parakilas, who left Facebook that year and has recently emerged as a harsh critic of the company. “It is shocking that this practice may still continue six years later, and it appears to contradict Facebook’s testimony to Congress that all friend permissions were disabled.”
The partnerships were briefly mentioned in documents submitted to German lawmakers investigating the social media giant’s privacy practices and released by Facebook in mid-May. But Facebook provided the lawmakers with the name of only one partner — BlackBerry, maker of the once-ubiquitous mobile device — and little information about how the agreements worked.
The submission followed testimony by Joel Kaplan, Facebook’s vice president for global public policy, during a closed-door German parliamentary hearing in April. Elisabeth Winkelmeier-Becker, one of the lawmakers who questioned Mr. Kaplan, said in an interview that she believed the data partnerships disclosed by Facebook violated users’ privacy rights.
“What we have been trying to determine is whether Facebook has knowingly handed over user data elsewhere without explicit consent,” Ms. Winkelmeier-Becker said. “I would never have imagined that this might even be happening secretly via deals with device makers. BlackBerry users seem to have been turned into data dealers, unknowingly and unwillingly.”
In interviews with The Times, Facebook identified other partners: Apple and Samsung, the world’s two biggest smartphone makers, and Amazon, which sells tablets.
An Apple spokesman said the company relied on private access to Facebook data for features that enabled users to post photos to the social network without opening the Facebook app, among other things. Apple said its phones no longer had such access to Facebook as of last September.
Samsung declined to respond to questions about whether it had any data-sharing partnerships with Facebook. Amazon also declined to respond to questions.
Usher Lieberman, a BlackBerry spokesman, said in a statement that the company used Facebook data only to give its own customers access to their Facebook networks and messages. Mr. Lieberman said that the company “did not collect or mine the Facebook data of our customers,” adding that “BlackBerry has always been in the business of protecting, not monetizing, customer data.”
Microsoft entered a partnership with Facebook in 2008 that allowed Microsoft-powered devices to do things like add contacts and friends and receive notifications, according to a spokesman. He added that the data was stored locally on the phone and was not synced to Microsoft’s servers.
Facebook acknowledged that some partners did store users’ data — including friends’ data — on their own servers. A Facebook official said that regardless of where the data was kept, it was governed by strict agreements between the companies.
“I am dumbfounded by the attitude that anybody in Facebook’s corporate office would think allowing third parties access to data would be a good idea,” said Henning Schulzrinne, a computer science professor at Columbia University who specializes in network security and mobile systems.
The Cambridge Analytica scandal revealed how loosely Facebook had policed the bustling ecosystem of developers building apps on its platform. They ranged from well-known players like Zynga, the maker of the FarmVille game, to smaller ones, like a Cambridge contractor who used a quiz taken by about 300,000 Facebook users to gain access to the profiles of as many as 87 million of their friends.
Those developers relied on Facebook’s public data channels, known as application programming interfaces, or APIs. But starting in 2007, the company also established private data channels for device manufacturers.
At the time, mobile phones were less powerful, and relatively few of them could run stand-alone Facebook apps like those now common on smartphones. The company continued to build new private APIs for device makers through 2014, spreading user data through tens of millions of mobile devices, game consoles, televisions and other systems outside Facebook’s direct control.
Facebook began moving to wind down the partnerships in April, after assessing its privacy and data practices in the wake of the Cambridge Analytica scandal. Mr. Archibong said the company had concluded that the partnerships were no longer needed to serve Facebook users. About 22 of them have been shut down.
The broad access Facebook provided to device makers raises questions about its compliance with a 2011 consent decree with the F.T.C.
The decree barred Facebook from overriding users’ privacy settings without first getting explicit consent. That agreement stemmed from an investigation that found Facebook had allowed app developers and other third parties to collect personal details about users’ friends, even when those friends had asked that their information remain private.
After the Cambridge Analytica revelations, the F.T.C. began an investigation into whether Facebook’s continued sharing of data after 2011 violated the decree, potentially exposing the company to fines.
Facebook officials said the private data channels did not violate the decree because the company viewed its hardware partners as “service providers,” akin to a cloud computing service paid to store Facebook data or a company contracted to process credit card transactions. According to the consent decree, Facebook does not need to seek additional permission to share friend data with service providers.
“These contracts and partnerships are entirely consistent with Facebook’s F.T.C. consent decree,” Mr. Archibong, the Facebook official, said.
But Jessica Rich, a former F.T.C. official who helped lead the commission’s earlier Facebook investigation, disagreed with that assessment.
“Under Facebook’s interpretation, the exception swallows the rule,” said Ms. Rich, now with the Consumers Union. “They could argue that any sharing of data with third parties is part of the Facebook experience. And this is not at all how the public interpreted their 2014 announcement that they would limit third-party app access to friend data.”
To test one partner’s access to Facebook’s private data channels, The Times used a reporter’s Facebook account — with about 550 friends — and a 2013 BlackBerry device, monitoring what data the device requested and received. (More recent BlackBerry devices, which run Google’s Android operating system, do not use the same private channels, BlackBerry officials said.)
Immediately after the reporter connected the device to his Facebook account, it requested some of his profile data, including user ID, name, picture, “about” information, location, email and cellphone number. The device then retrieved the reporter’s private messages and the responses to them, along with the name and user ID of each person with whom he was communicating.
The data flowed to a BlackBerry app known as the Hub, which was designed to let BlackBerry users view all of their messages and social media accounts in one place.
The Hub also requested — and received — data that Facebook’s policy appears to prohibit. Since 2015, Facebook has said that apps can request only the names of friends using the same app. But the BlackBerry app had access to all of the reporter’s Facebook friends and, for most of them, returned information such as user ID, birthday, work and education history and whether they were currently online.
The BlackBerry device was also able to retrieve identifying information for nearly 295,000 Facebook users. Most of them were second-degree Facebook friends of the reporter, or friends of friends.
In all, Facebook empowers BlackBerry devices to access more than 50 types of information about users and their friends, The Times found.
As Facebook sought to become the world’s dominant social media service, it struck agreements allowing phone and other device makers access to vast amounts of its users’ personal information.
Facebook has reached data-sharing partnerships with at least 60 device makers — including Apple, Amazon, BlackBerry, Microsoft and Samsung — over the last decade, starting before Facebook apps were widely available on smartphones, company officials said. The deals allowed Facebook to expand its reach and let device makers offer customers popular features of the social network, such as messaging, “like” buttons and address books.
But the partnerships, whose scope has not previously been reported, raise concerns about the company’s privacy protections and compliance with a 2011 consent decree with the Federal Trade Commission. Facebook allowed the device companies access to the data of users’ friends without their explicit consent, even after declaring that it would no longer share such information with outsiders. Some device makers could retrieve personal information even from users’ friends who believed they had barred any sharing, The New York Times found.
Most of the partnerships remain in effect, though Facebook began winding them down in April. The company came under intensifying scrutiny by lawmakers and regulators after news reports in March that a political consulting firm, Cambridge Analytica, misused the private information of tens of millions of Facebook users.
In the furor that followed, Facebook’s leaders said that the kind of access exploited by Cambridge in 2014 was cut off by the next year, when Facebook prohibited developers from collecting information from users’ friends. But the company officials did not disclose that Facebook had exempted the makers of cellphones, tablets and other hardware from such restrictions.
“You might think that Facebook or the device manufacturer is trustworthy,” said Serge Egelman, a privacy researcher at the University of California, Berkeley, who studies the security of mobile apps. “But the problem is that as more and more data is collected on the device — and if it can be accessed by apps on the device — it creates serious privacy and security risks.”
In interviews, Facebook officials defended the data sharing as consistent with its privacy policies, the F.T.C. agreement and pledges to users. They said its partnerships were governed by contracts that strictly limited use of the data, including any stored on partners’ servers. The officials added that they knew of no cases where the information had been misused.
The company views its device partners as extensions of Facebook, serving its more than two billion users, the officials said.
“These partnerships work very differently from the way in which app developers use our platform,” said Ime Archibong, a Facebook vice president. Unlike developers that provide games and services to Facebook users, the device partners can use Facebook data only to provide versions of “the Facebook experience,” the officials said.
Some device partners can retrieve Facebook users’ relationship status, religion, political leaning and upcoming events, among other data. Tests by The Times showed that the partners requested and received data in the same way other third parties did.
Facebook’s view that the device makers are not outsiders lets the partners go even further, The Times found: They can obtain data about a user’s Facebook friends, even those who have denied Facebook permission to share information with any third parties.
In interviews, several former Facebook software engineers and security experts said they were surprised at the ability to override sharing restrictions.
“It’s like having door locks installed, only to find out that the locksmith also gave keys to all of his friends so they can come in and rifle through your stuff without having to ask you for permission,” said Ashkan Soltani, a research and privacy consultant who formerly served as the F.T.C.’s chief technologist.
How One Phone Gains Access to Hundreds of Thousands of Facebook Accounts
ceGabriel J.X. Dance606 friendsof Mr. Dance
Michael LaForgia, a New York Times reporter, used the Hub app on a BlackBerry Z10 to log into Facebook.
After connecting to Facebook, the BlackBerry Hub app was able to retrieve detailed data on 556 of Mr. LaForgia's friends, including relationship status, religious and political leanings and events they planned to attend. Facebook has said that it cut off third parties' access to this type of information in 2015, but that it does not consider BlackBerry a third party in this case.
The Hub app was also able to access information — including unique identifiers — on 294,258 friends of Mr. LaForgia's friends.
By Rich Harris and Gabriel J.X. Dance
Details of Facebook’s partnerships have emerged amid a reckoning in Silicon Valley over the volume of personal information collected on the internet and monetized by the tech industry. The pervasive collection of data, while largely unregulated in the United States, has come under growing criticism from elected officials at home and overseas and provoked concern among consumers about how freely their information is shared.
In a tense appearance before Congress in March, Facebook’s chief executive, Mark Zuckerberg, emphasized what he said was a company priority for Facebook users.“Every piece of content that you share on Facebook you own,” he testified. ”You have complete control over who sees it and how you share it.”
But the device partnerships provoked discussion even within Facebook as early as 2012, according to Sandy Parakilas, who at the time led third-party advertising and privacy compliance for Facebook’s platform.
“This was flagged internally as a privacy issue,” said Mr. Parakilas, who left Facebook that year and has recently emerged as a harsh critic of the company. “It is shocking that this practice may still continue six years later, and it appears to contradict Facebook’s testimony to Congress that all friend permissions were disabled.”
The partnerships were briefly mentioned in documents submitted to German lawmakers investigating the social media giant’s privacy practices and released by Facebook in mid-May. But Facebook provided the lawmakers with the name of only one partner — BlackBerry, maker of the once-ubiquitous mobile device — and little information about how the agreements worked.
The submission followed testimony by Joel Kaplan, Facebook’s vice president for global public policy, during a closed-door German parliamentary hearing in April. Elisabeth Winkelmeier-Becker, one of the lawmakers who questioned Mr. Kaplan, said in an interview that she believed the data partnerships disclosed by Facebook violated users’ privacy rights.
“What we have been trying to determine is whether Facebook has knowingly handed over user data elsewhere without explicit consent,” Ms. Winkelmeier-Becker said. “I would never have imagined that this might even be happening secretly via deals with device makers. BlackBerry users seem to have been turned into data dealers, unknowingly and unwillingly.”
In interviews with The Times, Facebook identified other partners: Apple and Samsung, the world’s two biggest smartphone makers, and Amazon, which sells tablets.
An Apple spokesman said the company relied on private access to Facebook data for features that enabled users to post photos to the social network without opening the Facebook app, among other things. Apple said its phones no longer had such access to Facebook as of last September.
Samsung declined to respond to questions about whether it had any data-sharing partnerships with Facebook. Amazon also declined to respond to questions.
Usher Lieberman, a BlackBerry spokesman, said in a statement that the company used Facebook data only to give its own customers access to their Facebook networks and messages. Mr. Lieberman said that the company “did not collect or mine the Facebook data of our customers,” adding that “BlackBerry has always been in the business of protecting, not monetizing, customer data.”
Microsoft entered a partnership with Facebook in 2008 that allowed Microsoft-powered devices to do things like add contacts and friends and receive notifications, according to a spokesman. He added that the data was stored locally on the phone and was not synced to Microsoft’s servers.
Facebook acknowledged that some partners did store users’ data — including friends’ data — on their own servers. A Facebook official said that regardless of where the data was kept, it was governed by strict agreements between the companies.
“I am dumbfounded by the attitude that anybody in Facebook’s corporate office would think allowing third parties access to data would be a good idea,” said Henning Schulzrinne, a computer science professor at Columbia University who specializes in network security and mobile systems.
The Cambridge Analytica scandal revealed how loosely Facebook had policed the bustling ecosystem of developers building apps on its platform. They ranged from well-known players like Zynga, the maker of the FarmVille game, to smaller ones, like a Cambridge contractor who used a quiz taken by about 300,000 Facebook users to gain access to the profiles of as many as 87 million of their friends.
Those developers relied on Facebook’s public data channels, known as application programming interfaces, or APIs. But starting in 2007, the company also established private data channels for device manufacturers.
At the time, mobile phones were less powerful, and relatively few of them could run stand-alone Facebook apps like those now common on smartphones. The company continued to build new private APIs for device makers through 2014, spreading user data through tens of millions of mobile devices, game consoles, televisions and other systems outside Facebook’s direct control.
Facebook began moving to wind down the partnerships in April, after assessing its privacy and data practices in the wake of the Cambridge Analytica scandal. Mr. Archibong said the company had concluded that the partnerships were no longer needed to serve Facebook users. About 22 of them have been shut down.
The broad access Facebook provided to device makers raises questions about its compliance with a 2011 consent decree with the F.T.C.
The decree barred Facebook from overriding users’ privacy settings without first getting explicit consent. That agreement stemmed from an investigation that found Facebook had allowed app developers and other third parties to collect personal details about users’ friends, even when those friends had asked that their information remain private.
After the Cambridge Analytica revelations, the F.T.C. began an investigation into whether Facebook’s continued sharing of data after 2011 violated the decree, potentially exposing the company to fines.
Facebook officials said the private data channels did not violate the decree because the company viewed its hardware partners as “service providers,” akin to a cloud computing service paid to store Facebook data or a company contracted to process credit card transactions. According to the consent decree, Facebook does not need to seek additional permission to share friend data with service providers.
“These contracts and partnerships are entirely consistent with Facebook’s F.T.C. consent decree,” Mr. Archibong, the Facebook official, said.
But Jessica Rich, a former F.T.C. official who helped lead the commission’s earlier Facebook investigation, disagreed with that assessment.
“Under Facebook’s interpretation, the exception swallows the rule,” said Ms. Rich, now with the Consumers Union. “They could argue that any sharing of data with third parties is part of the Facebook experience. And this is not at all how the public interpreted their 2014 announcement that they would limit third-party app access to friend data.”
To test one partner’s access to Facebook’s private data channels, The Times used a reporter’s Facebook account — with about 550 friends — and a 2013 BlackBerry device, monitoring what data the device requested and received. (More recent BlackBerry devices, which run Google’s Android operating system, do not use the same private channels, BlackBerry officials said.)
Immediately after the reporter connected the device to his Facebook account, it requested some of his profile data, including user ID, name, picture, “about” information, location, email and cellphone number. The device then retrieved the reporter’s private messages and the responses to them, along with the name and user ID of each person with whom he was communicating.
The data flowed to a BlackBerry app known as the Hub, which was designed to let BlackBerry users view all of their messages and social media accounts in one place.
The Hub also requested — and received — data that Facebook’s policy appears to prohibit. Since 2015, Facebook has said that apps can request only the names of friends using the same app. But the BlackBerry app had access to all of the reporter’s Facebook friends and, for most of them, returned information such as user ID, birthday, work and education history and whether they were currently online.
The BlackBerry device was also able to retrieve identifying information for nearly 295,000 Facebook users. Most of them were second-degree Facebook friends of the reporter, or friends of friends.
In all, Facebook empowers BlackBerry devices to access more than 50 types of information about users and their friends, The Times found.
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I got rid of Twiter, Facebook, Google Plus / Chrome and YT accounts ages ago. all my shopping is done by spreading it around multiple retailers and any contentious internet searches are done with anti tracking and private browsing enabled.
Federalists, Totalitarians and Orwellians love this stuff.
Federalists, Totalitarians and Orwellians love this stuff.
Personally, I simply assume that anything I put out there is going to be fair game. So, I simply just guard what I put out there. I really don't have many secrets to keep anyhow....but I get the privacy concerns. Personally though, I enjoy keeping in touch with family and friends, and even long ago friends, classmates, and coworkers, etc. Not to mention, such networking is really the best way to stay employed these days.
We can fight the corporate oligarchy all we want, but its a losing proposition, and a war that has already been won, by them. At some point, you just have to decide if you're going to simply make the most of it, or wallow in misery against the system. I'm going to just try and be happy. Sometimes, I wish I was just another one of the ignorant sheep though, lol...but instead, I'll just try and be a happy wolf while donning my sheep outfit.
We can fight the corporate oligarchy all we want, but its a losing proposition, and a war that has already been won, by them. At some point, you just have to decide if you're going to simply make the most of it, or wallow in misery against the system. I'm going to just try and be happy. Sometimes, I wish I was just another one of the ignorant sheep though, lol...but instead, I'll just try and be a happy wolf while donning my sheep outfit.
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Disaster (including wildfire) STHF communications plan- Latest: Robert Stewart
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Easing into Retirement from a financial perspective- Latest: Mountain trapper
