Everything from admitting to further data breaches, to altering images, to supressing legitimate content, to considering payment for access, to shareholder revolt, it seems......
The Herald
Sun reported on 9 June 2018 at p.59:
Facebook is embroiled
in another data privacy scandal, confirming a software bug led to the
private posts of 14 million users being made public.
According to Facebook,
the bug was active from May 18 to May 27 and changed the privacy settings of
some users without telling them.
“Today we started
letting the 14 million people affected know — and asking them to review any
posts they made during that time,” Facebook chief privacy officer
Erin Egan said.
“To be clear, this bug
did not impact anything people had posted before, and they could still choose
their audience just as they always have.” It was unclear yesterday how many
Australian users were affected. Facebook said the bug occurred
during the development of a new share function that allowed users to share
featured items on their profile page, such as a photo.
“The problem has been
fixed, and for anyone affected, we changed the audience back to what they’d
been using before,” Ms Egan said.
Facebook has urged
affected customers to review posts made between May 18 and May 27 to see if any
private posts had been automatically made public.
The latest issue comes
as Facebook chief Mark Zuckerberg faces the prospect of a public
grilling before the Australian parliament’s intelligence and security
committee.
Facebook admitted
this week it had struck data partnerships — where it shares the
personal data of people on the social media platform — with at least
four Chinese electronics companies, including Huawei Technologies.
Huawei has been barred
from a series of major projects in Australia over concerns about its close
links to the Chinese government.
Members of the
parliamentary intelligence and security committee want Mr Zuckerberg to come to
Australia and answer questions about the data-sharing pact.
On 18 June
2018 The
Sun reported that Facebook Inc
had begun to manipulate images – effectively producing ‘fake images’ that
were being passed off a real.
Then on 20
June 2018 Facebook Inc. declared its intention to charge certain private group users
for participation on its platforms:
Today, we’re piloting
subscriptions with a small number of groups to continue
to support group admins who lead these communities.
This world-wide
social platform apparently expects that if it formally launches this access fee
(reportedly up to $360 a year) then these costs to be passed on as subscription
fees – with Facebook letting
administrators charge subscription fees from $4.99 to $29.99 each month to join
premium subgroups containing exclusive posts.
Presumably,
if the market responds in sufficient numbers then Facebook will change the rules and demand that private groups hand
over a percentage of subscription fees collected.
The
Guardian, 24
June 2018:
George Orwell wrote in
his essay Politics and the English Language: “In our age there is no such thing
as ‘keeping out of politics’. All issues are political issues.”
When Facebook constructed
a new archive of political advertising, had it thought a little more about this
concept of what is “political”, it might have more accurately anticipated the
subsequent Orwellian headache. As it is, journalists are finding their articles
restricted from promotion because they are lumped in with campaigning materials
from politicians, lobby groups and advocacy organisations.
The new archive of ads
with political content, which Facebook made public last month, has become
the latest contested piece of territory between platforms and publishers. The
complaint from publishers is that Facebook is categorising posts in which they
are promoting their own journalism (paying money to target particular groups of
the audience) as “political ads”. Publishers have reacted furiously to what
they see as toxic taxonomy.
Mark Thompson, the chief
executive of the New York Times, has been the most vocal critic, describing
Facebook’s practices as “a threat to democracy” and criticising the platform in
a recent speech to the Open Markets Initiative in Washington DC. “When it comes
to news, Facebook still doesn’t get it,” said Thompson. “In its effort to clear
up one bad mess, it seems to be joining those who want to blur the line between
reality-based journalism and propaganda.”
At a separate event at
Columbia University, Thompson and Facebook’s head of news partnerships,
Campbell Brown, fought openly about the initiative. Thompson showed examples of
where New York Times articles, including recipes, had been wrongly flagged as
political. Brown emphasised that the archive was being refined, but stood firm
on the principle that promoted journalism ought to be flagged as “paid-for”
political posts. “On this you are just wrong,” she told Thompson.
Publishers took to
social platforms to question the labelling and representation of their work.
One of the most egregious examples came from investigative journalism
organisation Reveal. Last week, at the height of the scandal around the
separation of undocumented migrant families crossing the US border, it published an exclusive story involving the alleged drugging of
children at a centre housing immigrant minors. It was flagged in the Facebook
system as containing political content, and as Reveal had not registered its
promotion of the story, the promoted posts were stifled. Facebook did not
remove the article, but rather stopped its paid circulation. Given the
importance of paid promotion, it is not surprising that publishers see this as
amounting to the same thing.
And trust issues can be found both inside and outside Facebook's castle walls.....
And trust issues can be found both inside and outside Facebook's castle walls.....
Business
Insider, 24
June 2018:
A Survata study, seen
exclusively by Business Insider, asked US consumers to rate big tech companies
from one (most trusted) to five (least trusted). Survata surveyed more than
2,600 people in April and May. It’s the first time Survata has carried out the
survey.
The results show that
Facebook is nowhere near as trusted as Amazon, PayPal, or Microsoft – but that
people do trust it more than Instagram. Instagram, of course, is owned by
Facebook.
Here’s the top 15 in
order of most to least trusted:
1 .Amazon
2. PayPal
3. Microsoft
4. Apple
5. IBM
6. Yahoo
7. Google
8. YouTube
9. eBay
10. Pandora
11. Facebook
12. LinkedIn
13. Spotify
14. AOL
15. Instagram
Business
Insider, 26
June 2018:
Shareholders with nearly
$US3 billion invested Facebook are trying to topple Mark Zuckerberg as chairman
and tear up the company’s governance structure.
Business Insider has
spoken with six prominent shareholders who said there was an unprecedented
level of unrest among Facebook’s backers following a series of scandals.
They are in open revolt
about Zuckerberg’s power base, which gives him the ability to swat away any
shareholder proposal he disagrees with.
One investor compared him to a robber baron, a
derogatory term for 19th-century US tycoons who accumulated enormous wealth.
Finally, it was reported on 29 June 2018 by IT News that, you guessed it, yet another Facebook sponsored personality test was allowing data to be extracted without the users knowledge or informed consent:
A security researcher
has found that a popular personality test app running on Facebook contained an
easily exploitable flaw that could be used to expose sensitive information on
tens of millions of users.
Belgian security
researcher Inti De Ceukelaire joined Facebook's bug bounty program, set up
by the giant social network after the Cambridge Analytica data leak scandal and tried out
the NameTests.com's personality test app developed by Social Sweethearts.
De Ceukelaire discovered that
when he loaded a personality test, NameTests.com fetched his personal data from
Facebook and displayed it on a webpage.
He was shocked to see
that users' personal data was wrapped in a Javascript file by NameTests.com,
which could be accessed via a weblink over the plain text HTTP protocol.
This meant that any
website that requested the file could access the personal information retrieved
from users' Facebook accounts.
The security researcher
tested this by setting up a website that connected to NameTests.com and was
able to access Facebook posts, photos and friend lists belonging to visitors.
Information leaked
included people's Facebook IDs, first and last names, languages used, gender,
date of birth, profile pictures, cover photo, currency, devices used, and much
more.
Worse, De
Ceukelaire found that NameTests.com doesn't log off users which means the
site would continue to leak user data even after the app was deleted.
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