Facebook’s woes mounted on Wednesday, as it faced a lawsuit alleging privacy breaches related to data leaked to a consultancy working on US President Donald Trump’s 2016 campaign, and as a new report suggested it shared more data with partners than it has acknowledged.
Facebook shares already sagging under the weight of the social network’s troubles ended the trading day down 7.25 percent to US$133.24 and slipped even lower in after-market trades.
The suit filed by District of Columbia Attorney General Karl Racine is likely the first by an official US body that could impose consequences on the world’s leading social network for data misuse.
“Facebook failed to protect the privacy of its users, and deceived them about who had access to their data and how it was used,” Racine said in a statement. “Facebook put users at risk of manipulation by allowing companies like Cambridge Analytica and other third-party applications to collect personal data without users’ permission.”
The suit filed in the Washington Superior Court seeks an injunction to make sure Facebook puts in place safeguards to monitor users’ data and makes it easier for users to control privacy settings, and demands restitution for consumers.
Facebook said it was reviewing the complaint.
The social network has said that up to 87 million users might have had their data hijacked by Cambridge Analytica, which shut down weeks after the news emerged on its handling of private user information.
A whistle-blower at the consultancy, which worked on Trump’s presidential campaign, said it used Facebook data to develop profiles of users who were targeted with personalized messages that could have played on their fears.
The scandal has triggered a series of investigations and a broad review by Facebook on how it shares user data with third parties.
The New York Times reported that about 150 companies — including powerful partners like Amazon, Microsoft, Netflix and Spotify — could access detailed information about Facebook users, including data about their friends.
According to documents seen by the Times, Facebook allowed Microsoft’s Bing search engine to see names of Facebook users’ friends without consent, and gave Netflix and Spotify the ability to read private messages.
The report said Amazon was able to obtain people’s user names and contact information through their friends, and Yahoo could view streams of friends’ posts.
While some of the deals date back as far as 2010, the Times said they remained active as late as last year — and some were still in effect this year.
Facebook late on Wednesday pushed back against critics, saying it had carefully negotiated deals with select partners to explore features such as friends sharing what they were listening to on Spotify or watching on Netflix.
“In the past day, we’ve been accused of disclosing people’s private messages to partners without their knowledge,” Facebook vice president of product partnerships Ime Archibong said in a blog post. “That’s not true.”
To exchange messages or complete tasks such as sharing files or sending money, apps being used require the relevant technical access.
“Why did the messaging partners have read/write/delete messaging access?” Archibong asked. “That was the point of this feature.”
The experiences at issue were publicly discussed and only available when people used Facebook to log into services, the firm said.
“No third party was reading your private messages, or writing messages to your friends without your permission,” Archibong said.
‘BARBAROUS ACTS’: The captain of the fishing vessel said that people in checkered clothes beat them with iron bars and that he fell unconscious for about an hour Ten Vietnamese fishers were violently robbed in the South China Sea, state media reported yesterday, with an official saying the attackers came from Chinese-flagged vessels. The men were reportedly beaten with iron bars and robbed of thousands of dollars of fish and equipment on Sunday off the Paracel Islands (Xisha Islands, 西沙群島), which Taiwan claims, as do Vietnam, China, Brunei, Malaysia and the Philippines. Vietnamese media did not identify the nationalities of the attackers, but Phung Ba Vuong, an official in central Quang Ngai province, told reporters: “They were Chinese, [the boats had] Chinese flags.” Four of the 10-man Vietnamese crew were rushed
NEW STORM: investigators dubbed the attacks on US telecoms ‘Salt Typhoon,’ after authorities earlier this year disrupted China’s ‘Flax Typhoon’ hacking group Chinese hackers accessed the networks of US broadband providers and obtained information from systems that the federal government uses for court-authorized wiretapping, the Wall Street Journal (WSJ) reported on Saturday. The networks of Verizon Communications, AT&T and Lumen Technologies, along with other telecoms, were breached by the recently discovered intrusion, the newspaper said, citing people familiar with the matter. The hackers might have held access for months to network infrastructure used by the companies to cooperate with court-authorized US requests for communications data, the report said. The hackers had also accessed other tranches of Internet traffic, it said. The Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs
STICKING TO DEFENSE: Despite the screening of videos in which they appeared, one of the defendants said they had no memory of the event A court trying a Frenchman charged with drugging his wife and enlisting dozens of strangers to rape her screened videos of the abuse to the public on Friday, to challenge several codefendants who denied knowing she was unconscious during their actions. The judge in the southern city of Avignon had nine videos and several photographs of the abuse of Gisele Pelicot shown in the courtroom and an adjoining public chamber, involving seven of the 50 men accused alongside her husband. Present in the courtroom herself, Gisele Pelicot looked at her telephone during the hour and a half of screenings, while her ex-husband
Scientists yesterday announced a milestone in neurobiological research with the mapping of the entire brain of an adult fruit fly, a feat that might provide insight into the brains of other organisms and even people. The research detailed more than 50 million connections between more than 139,000 neurons — brain nerve cells — in the insect, a species whose scientific name is Drosophila melanogaster and is often used in neurobiological studies. The research sought to decipher how brains are wired and the signals underlying healthy brain functions. It could also pave the way for mapping the brains of other species. “You might
RSS