File this under "Yet Another National Database" cross referenced wih "What Could Possibly Go Wrong?"

The Sydney Morning Herald, 6 May 2018:

A massive breach of Commonweath Bank data exposed last week has raised security fears around a new national database of Australian bank customers, as Labor pushes for a delay to part of the scheme's scheduled introduction in less than two months.

The database - set to go live on July 1 - will include the details of every person who has taken out a loan or a credit card, along with their repayment history.

The Mandatory Comprehensive Credit Reporting scheme was a recommendation of the 2014 financial system inquiry and is designed to give lenders access to a deeper, richer set of data to ensure loans are only being approved for people who can afford to repay them.

The new requirements will first apply to the Commonwealth Bank, ANZ Bank, Westpac and National Australia Bank, given they account for up to 80 per cent of lending to households.

But the collection of sensitive data by private companies has raised concerns in the wake of several high-profile data breaches, including the disappearance of 20 million customers records from the Commonwealth Bank.

The Financial Rights Legal Centre and the Consumer Action Law Centre claim the financial details of millions of Australians will be vulnerable under the new scheme - which includes positive and negative credit histories.

Financial Rights Legal Centre policy officer Julia Davis said the development "was a major intrusion into our financial privacy".

"I don’t think Australians realise this is about to happen," she said.

The legislation states all credit reporting bodies must store the information on a cloud service that has been assessed by the Australian Signals Directorate. It also contains a provision allowing banks to stop supplying customer data to credit providers should there be a major security breach.

Ms Davis said the oversight was welcome but the internal systems of credit reporting bodies remained "completely opaque."

"Once that data goes live in the one place you can't put the toothpaste back in the tube," she said.

Equifax, one of the companies which will have access to the data, had its systems in the US hacked last year, exposing the personal information of 143 million Americans and triggering to the resignation of its chief executive.

It is also being sued by consumer watchdog the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission over allegations it misrepresented its product to consumers by asking them to pay for their own credit histories which are usually available online for free.

The company's general manager of external relations, Matthew Strassberg, said Equifax had "only been a marquee above the door for six months," after the US giant took over the Australian operation formerly known as Veda.

He said the credit reporting business would provide "a 360 degree picture."

"A bank will have a very deep insight into what they know of you," he told Fairfax Media.

Mr Strassberg said he recognised that Australians were concerned about data security…..

Is Telstra selling customer location data? Did it ever specifically request permission from account holders?

https://www.telstra.com.au/content/dam/tcom/personal/privacy/pdf/sample-data-oct-2015.pdf

The Sydney Morning Herald, 4 May 2018:

Telstra is making money by on-selling location data from its customers' mobile phones in similar deals to a partnership with the Bureau of Statistics that caused a public backlash last week.

The Australian Bureau of Statistics came under fire for partnering with the telco for a study in 2016, which used mobile phone data showing how many people were in particular suburbs hour by hour.

Similar data is now available for a fee, after the Location Insights program was quietly launched by the telco in July 2016. The Australian Bureau of Statistics was the first licensee under the program, but has not used Telstra's Location Insights since then.

Data available to Telstra's clients can be broken down into 15 minute increments, and demographics broken down by age groups and gender. The smallest geographic areas available for analysis are the same as the Australian Bureau of Statistics' smallest statistical area, which have an average population of 400 people and could have as few as 200 people.

In a video used to spruik the service by Telstra, potential customers are listed as local governments and transport companies. It’s not clear how many organisations have used the service, or what the price tag is for such information.

“Imagine if you could know what is happening in your community, region, or city hub, every 15 minutes,” a voiceover in the Youtube video promoting the program said.

“Telstra Location Insights builds industry-specific metrics where data sets are used for modelling purposes and then extrapolated to estimate for the entire population,” a Telstra spokesman said.

“These metrics are aggregated spatially and temporally before differential privacy and k-anonymisation are both applied to completely anonymise the data.”

This explanation is not accepted by senior lecturer at the University of Melbourne Vanessa Teague.

“In order to know whether those things actually work, we need to see what the parameters are and how they're applied to the data in order to be assured that they’re applied correctly and they work,” Dr Teague said.

Dr Teague is chair of the Cybersecurity and Democracy Network and was part of a team of researchers who re-identified patient health records from Pharmaceutical Benefits Scheme data that was released by the government.

“It's possible that [anonymising the data] has been done correctly, it's also possible that they think it’s been done correctly but they’re wrong. And really the only way to assess that is to get a clear and detailed technical description of what they've done,” Dr Teague said.

“If they've done it right then there's no reason to be secretive about the details of what they’ve done, if they’ve done it wrong then they are better off getting a genuine open assessment of it so they can find out sooner rather than later.”

Telstra said the use of the information was in line with its privacy statement, which states that customers’ information could be shared with “our dealers, our related entities or our business or commercial partners and other businesses we work with”.

Dr Teague is sceptical about that explanation. “Just because a company holds highly sensitive information about you doesn’t mean that that data is their property that they should then be able to turnaround and sell without asking you,” she said.

Now when I read Telstra's privacy statement I do not recall that it mentioned that it would be selling mobile phone location information in SA1 statistical level data bundles captured at 15 minute intervals (as mentioned in the news article) and, that those bundles could be used to create data sets which track an individual's movements over time in relatively fine detail.

Yamba in the Clarence Valley NSW is a quiet little town with a population of approx. 6,076 persons living in 3,820 dwellings spread across est. 16 SLA1 statistical levels and in over 100 even smaller statistical Mesh Blocks.

http://stat.abs.gov.au/itt/r.jsp?ABSMaps 

I suspect that many Yamba residents will not be happy with the idea that Telstra Corporation Limited will alllow their movements to be tracked and their daily habits predicted if an individual, private company, government agency or political party pays them for the town's mobile phone location data.

The man who would be prime minister

“In terms of ministerial oversight, the portfolio has the following ministers: the Minister for Home Affairs, who sits in the cabinet and who is also separately sworn as the Minister for Immigration and Border Protection; the Minister for Citizenship and Multicultural Affairs; the Minister for Law Enforcement and Cybersecurity; and the Assistant Minister for Home Affairs. The core functions of the department are policy, strategy, planning and coordination in relation to the domestic security and law enforcement functions of the Commonwealth as well as managed migration and the movement of goods across our borders…..four portfolio agencies that sit alongside the department, which are statutorily independent, but they are within the portfolio. They all, like me, report to the cabinet minister. The Australian Federal Police, ACIC, AUSTRAC and Australian Border Force. That is four. Then, with the passage of relevant legislation that is currently before the parliament, ASIO will move across soon.”  [Secretary Dept. of Home Affairs Michael Pezullo at Senate Estimates Hearing, Legal and Constitutional Affairs Legislation Committee, 26 February 2018]

The worry about concentration of political power per se and that power in inappropriate hands…….

The Saturday Paper, 28 April 2018:

Peter Dutton is arguably the most powerful person in the country. In his new ministry he has oversight for national security, for the Federal Police, Border Force and ASIO, for the law enforcement and emergency management functions of the Attorney-General’s Department, the transport security functions of the Department of Infrastructure, Regional Development and Cities, the counterterrorism and cybersecurity functions of the Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet, the multicultural affairs functions of the Department of Social Services, and the entire Department of Immigration and Border Protection.

It is hard to imagine any member of federal parliament less suited to exercise the sort of powers now held by Dutton. It is easy to argue that no minister should be entrusted with such vast powers. But the fact that those powers are in Dutton’s hands is seriously alarming.

Ministerial powers are subject to limits. The rule of law means that the limits are subject to supervision by the judicial system. Most ministers understand that. Dutton apparently does not…..

On April 7, 2018, Dutton called for “like-minded” countries to come together and review the relevance of the 1951 Refugee Convention.

So, here it is: Australia’s most powerful minister is wilfully mistreating innocent people at vast public expense. He is waging a propaganda war against refugees and against the people who try to help them. And he is trying to persuade other countries to back away from international human rights protection.

He tries to make it seem tolerable by hiding it all away in other countries, so that we can’t see the facts for ourselves. [my yellow highlighting]

Evidence that the community concern is justified…….

MSM News, 29 April 2018:

Ministers are planning to make it easier for the government to spy on its own citizens, a leaked document has revealed.

As it stands, the Australian Federal Police and Australian Security Intelligence Organisation need a warrant from The Attorney-General to access Australians' emails, bank records and text messages.

But ministers are reportedly planning to amend the Intelligence Services Act of 2001 to allow Home Affairs Minister Peter Dutton and Defence Minister Marise Payne to give the orders without the country's top lawyer knowing. 

The intelligence - which could include financial transactions, health data and phone records - would be collected by a government spy agency called the Australian Signals Directorate. 

The plan was revealed by a leaked letter from Home Affairs Secretary Mike Pezzullo to Defence Secretary Greg Moriarty.

The top secret letter, written in February and seen by The Sunday Telegraph, details a plan to 'hack into critical infrastructure' to 'proactively disrupt and covertly remove' cyber-enabled criminals including child exploitation and terror networks. 

In March, the plan was outlined in a ministerial submission signed by Mike Burgess, the chief of the Australian Signals Directorate.

It states: 'The Department of Home Affairs advises that it is briefing the Minister for Home Affairs to write to you (Ms Payne) seeking your support for a further tranche of legislative reform to enable ASD to better support a range of Home Affairs priorities.'

But a proposal to change the law has not yet been made.

A spokesman for the Defence Minister Ms Payne said: 'There has been no request to the Minister for Defence to allow ASD to counter or disrupt cyber-­enabled criminals onshore.' 

      

An intelligence source told The Sunday Telegraph that the proposals could spell danger for Australians.

'It would give the most powerful cyber spies the power to turn on their own citizens,' the source said.

The letter also outlines 'step-in' powers which could force companies to hand over citizens' data, the source added.

The submission says the powers would help keep Australian businesses and individuals safe. [my yellow highlighting]

The inherent dishonesty of the Dept. of Home Affairs…..

Secretary of Department of Home Affairs Michael Pezullo, Senate Estimates, Legal and Constitutional Affairs Legislation Committee, 26 February 2018, denying the possibility of by-passing the judiciary and “the country's top lawyer”:

As I said at the last estimates meeting of this committee, all executive power is subject to the sovereignty of this parliament and to the supremacy of the law. In bringing the security powers, capabilities and capacities of the Commonwealth together into a single portfolio, these fundamentals will remain in place. All of them are crucial attributes of liberty. I repeat what I said last year to this committee: any contrary suggestion that the establishment of Home Affairs will somehow create an extra judicial apparatus of power bears no relationship to the facts or to how our system of government works, and any suggestion that we in the portfolio are somehow embarked on the secret deconstruction of the supervisory controls which envelop and check executive power are nothing more than flights of conspiratorial fancy that read into all relevant utterances the master blueprint of a new ideology of undemocratic surveillance and social control. [my yellow highting]

Ministerial denial - of sorts....

When confronted by the mainstream media Dutton supported government spying on its citizens, saying he believes there is a case to be made for giving the Australian Signals Directorate more powers to investigate domestic cyber threats, with appropriate safeguards in place and "If we were to make any changes ... I would want to see judicial oversight or the first law officer (attorney-general) with the power to sign off on those warrants".

Hands up everyone in Australia who will sleep well knowing that the tsar has spoken. *crickets*

Turnbull Government has just placed a multinational corportion with an appalling human rights record at the first contact interface with the National Disability Insurance Scheme

“It has a history of problems, failures, fatal errors and overcharging”  [Senior Appleby compliance officer quoted in The Guardian on the subject of Serco, 7 June 2017]

If the National Disability Insurance Agency (NDIA) didn't have enough internal structural problems to deal with along comes the UK-based multinational Serco Group.

A group implicated in: human rights abuses in prisons and immigration detention centres it has managed; poor to unsafe health service delivery including at Fiona Stanley Hospital in Perth, overcharging for services rendered under government contracts, fraudulent record keeping and manipulating results when there was a failure to reach targets; mishandling of radioactive waste and labour rights abuses.

The Guardian, 23 Apri 2018:

Disability rights groups, Labor and the Greens have slammed a decision to hire the multinational outsourcing giant Serco in a key role administering the national disability insurance scheme.

The National Disability Insurance Agency (NDIA) announced on Friday afternoon that Serco, a company with a chequered corporate history, would help run its contact centres under a two-year contract.

The decision would put the company at the frontline of the NDIS, interacting frequently with people with disability and service providers, many of whom are still grappling with a vast, complex and sometimes confusing scheme.

 “Sourcing our contact centre services from Serco will give ongoing flexibility, responsiveness and value for money,” the NDIA said in a statement.

But the decision has outraged disability rights campaigners, who say Serco’s poor history abroad and its lack of experience in disability should have precluded it from any role delivering the landmark scheme. 

People with Disability Australia co-chief executive, Matthew Bowden, said he was “gravely concerned” that Serco would, like other third-party providers, fail to uphold the values, objectives and principles underpinning the NDIS.

“We have no details on what expertise Serco have in providing communication services for people with disability, or why the NDIA has decided to outsource such a vital part of its services,” Bowden said.

“The NDIA needs to hire more staff and make their communication avenues with people with disability more transparent. Instead, they are offloading their responsibilities, and requirements, to deliver services to people with disability.”

Paralympian Kurt Fearnley was among those expressing concern at the decision, saying Serco would be “racking their brains on how they can bring lived experience of disabilities into their workplace”.

“The NDIS will be worthless if people with disabilities aren’t at its core!” he tweeted.

Did the Australian Bureau of Statistics spy on Telstra customers at one remove in 2016?

“…with its near-complete coverage of the population, mobile device data is now seen as a feasible way to estimate temporary populations” [Australian Bureau of Statistics Demographer Andrew Howe, quoted in The Australian Bureau of Statistics Tracked People By Their Mobile Device Data at Medium, 23 April 2018]

Cryptoparty founder. Amnesty Australia 'Humanitarian Media Award' recipient 2014 and activist Asher Wolf recently reported that in 2016 the Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) without informing or seeking permission from mobile phone users ran a secretive, publicly-funded tracking program via signals emitted by the mobile phones of an unspecified number of people, in order to find out where they travelled over the course of an unspecified number of days and how long they stayed at each location.

A presentation of the basic details of this pilot study was made by the ABS researcher leading the pilot at a Spatial Information Day in Adelaide on 11 August 2017.

A second ABS researcher also made a presentation on the day.

Spatial Information Day (which has the ABS as one of its sponsors) is characterised by the organisers as an annual educational and promotional event and was first held just on 18 years ago.

The Australian Bureau of Statistics was swift to reply to Asher Wolf's Medium article, stating that it has only been supplied with hourly agregate data by the telco (Telstra) which did not identify individuals.

However, the aggregated data supplied to the ABS was at the second lowest SA2 Level and some of these statistcal areas have populations of well under 3,000 residents according to 2016 Census data. Which makes the task of matching names to some of the tracked population movements just that much easier for a demographer or determined hacker.

Given recent less than transparent disclosures by data mining corporations concerning data collection/retention practices, readers might forgive me for waiting to see if the other shoe drops in this ABS-Telsta data mining and privacy matter.

One might say that thanks to Ms. Wolf we are all being educated further about big data and the ethics of data collection.

This is the response Ms. Wolf received when she contacted privacy experts concerning the pilot study:

“I find this tracking of people using their telephone location data without their knowledge and consent extremely concerning. The fact that the telecoms company allowed this data to be handed to a third party, and then for that third party to be a government agency compounds the breach of trust for the people whose data was involved,” said Angela Daly, Vice Chancellor’s Senior Research Fellow and Senior Lecturer in Queensland University of Technology’s Faculty of Law, research associate in the Tilburg Institute for Law, Technology and Society and Digital Rights Watch board member.

“After the Cambridge Analytica/Facebook scandal this is yet another example of why we need much tougher restrictions on what companies and the government can do with our data.”

Electronic Frontiers Australia board member Justin Warren also pointed out that while there are beneficial uses for this kind of information, “…the ABS should be treading much more carefully than it is. The ABS damaged its reputation with its bungled management of the 2016 Census, and with its failure to properly consult with civil society about its decision to retain names and addresses. Now we discover that the ABS is running secret tracking experiments on the population?”

“Even if the ABS’ motives are benign, this behaviour — making ethically dubious decisions without consulting the public it is experimenting on — continues to damage the once stellar reputation of the ABS.”

“This kind of population tracking has a dark history. During World War II, the US Census Bureau used this kind of tracking information to round up Japanese-Americans for internment. Census data was used extensively by Nazi Germany to target specific groups of people. The ABS should be acutely aware of these historical abuses, and the current tensions within society that mirror those earlier, dark days all too closely.”

“The ABS must work much harder to ensure that it is conducting itself with the broad support of the Australian populace. Sadly, it appears that the ABS increasingly considers itself above the mundane concerns of those outside its ivory tower. This arrogance must end.”

“For us to continue to trust the ABS with our most intimate details, the ABS must maintain society’s trust. Conducting experiments on citizens without seeming to care about our approval or consent undermines that trust.”

International privacy advocates also raised concerns about the study.

“Data the companies, like telcos, collect inevitably becomes very attractive to government agencies looking to track, monitor, and survey people. Like here, users are rarely informed, let alone consent to these uses. The impact on privacy rights is severe: location information (especially combined with other sensitive data) can reveal startlingly detailed information about your life (where you live, work), connections (who you talk to or visit), preferences (what you buy and when), and health (doctors and pharmacies frequented),” stated Amie Stepanovich, U.S. Policy Manager for digital rights organisation Access Now.

Read Asher Wolf’s full article at https://medium.com/@Asher_Wolf/the-australian-bureau-of-statistics-tracked-people-by-their-mobile-device-data-and-didnt-tell-them-16df094de31

Away from the spotlight of congressional hearings Zuckerberg and Facebook Inc. show their true colours – implementing weaker privacy protection for 1.5 billion users

The Guardian, 19 April 2018:

Facebook has moved more than 1.5 billion users out of reach of European privacy law, despite a promise from Mark Zuckerberg to apply the “spirit” of the legislation globally.

In a tweak to its terms and conditions, Facebook is shifting the responsibility for all users outside the US, Canada and the EU from its international HQ in Ireland to its main offices in California. It means that those users will now be on a site governed by US law rather than Irish law.

The move is due to come into effect shortly before General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) comes into force in Europe on 25 May. Facebook is liable under GDPR for fines of up to 4% of its global turnover – around $1.6bn – if it breaks the new data protection rules.

The shift highlights the cautious phrasing Facebook has applied to its promises around GDPR. Earlier this month, when asked whether his company would promise GDPR protections to its users worldwide, Zuckerberg demurred. “We’re still nailing down details on this, but it should directionally be, in spirit, the whole thing,” he said.

A week later, during his hearings in front of the US Congress, Zuckerberg was again asked if he would promise that GDPR’s protections would apply to all Facebook users. His answer was affirmative – but only referred to GDPR “controls”, rather than “protections”. Worldwide, Facebook has rolled out a suite of tools to let users exercise their rights under GDPR, such as downloading and deleting data, and the company’s new consent-gathering controls are similarly universal.

Facebook told Reuters “we apply the same privacy protections everywhere, regardless of whether your agreement is with Facebook Inc or Facebook Ireland”. It said the change was only carried out “because EU law requires specific language” in mandated privacy notices, which US law does not.

In a statement to the Guardian, it added: “We have been clear that we are offering everyone who uses Facebook the same privacy protections, controls and settings, no matter where they live. These updates do not change that.”

Privacy researcher Lukasz Olejnik disagreed, noting that the change carried large ramifications for the affected users. “Moving around one and a half billion users into other jurisdictions is not a simple copy-and-paste exercise,” he said.

“This is a major and unprecedented change in the data privacy landscape. The change will amount to the reduction of privacy guarantees and the rights of users, with a number of ramifications, notably for consent requirements. Users will clearly lose some existing rights, as US standards are lower than those in Europe.

“Data protection authorities from the countries of the affected users, such as New Zealand and Australia, may want to reassess this situation and analyse the situation. 

Even if their data privacy regulators are less rapid than those in Europe, this event is giving them a chance to act. Although it is unclear how active they will choose to be, the global privacy regulation landscape is changing, with countries in the world refining their approach. Europe is clearly on the forefront of this competition, but we should expect other countries to eventually catch up.” [my yellow highlighting]

NOTE:

The Australian Dept. of Human Services still continues to invite those who use its welfare services to visit its five Facebook pages on which it will:

* post about payments and services 
* answer questions 
* give useful tips 
* share news, and 
* give updates on relevant issue

All associated data (including questions and answers) will of course be captured by Facebook, then collated, transferred, stored overseas, monetised and possibly 'weaponised' during the next election campaign cycle which occurs in the area visitors to these pages live.

In Febuary-March 2018 there were 63 Notifiable Data Breaches in Australia involving the personal information of up to 341,849 individuals

In the 2016–17 financial year, the Office of the Australian Information Commissioner (OAIC) reported that it received 114 data breach notifications on a voluntary basis.

On 22 February the Notifiable Data Breaches (NDB) scheme came into force.

Between 22 February and 31 March 2018 there were 63 mandatory notifiable data breaches reported involving the personal information of up to est. 341,849 individuals, with 55 of these breaches reported in March alone.

Of these breaches:

24 were the result of criminal or malicious attack;

32 were the result of human error;

2 were system fault; and

1 was classified as “Other”.

The type of personal information involved in the data breaches:

Three of these data breaches involved the personal information of between 10,000 and 999,999 people in each instance.

At least 15 of the 63 data breached involved personal information held by “health service providers”. Health service providers are considered to be any organisation that provides a health service and holds health information.

Every individual whose personal information was breached was supposed to be notified by the entity holding their information, however the OAIC Quarterly Statistics Report: January 2018 - March 2018 did not specifically state that this had occurred. 

It is getting harder and harder to believe Facebook Inc's denials of intentional harm

The fact that Facebook Inc. re-named the street in which it is headquartered "1 Hacker Way" should have been a clue to this social media giant's business ethos but it obviously didn't register with national governments and everyday Internet users. 

By the time All tech reported this on 11 November 2016 we were all a little more informed, but Facebook was still trying to pull the wool over our eyes:

Mark Zuckerberg says the notion that fake news influenced the U.S. presidential election is "a pretty crazy idea."

The Facebook CEO is finding himself in a unique position in this election cycle. Many news organizations have come under fire for their coverage of the campaign. Now Facebook is getting it too, as a modern media company that does not vet fake news from its News Feed and that, critics argue, allows users to stay in information bubbles that reinforce existing prejudices.

Zuckerberg took both these criticisms head-on yesterday, at a conference called Techonomy. (You can find the full interview on his Facebook feed.)

He says hoaxes existed before his platform was created. They aren't new, and people who say misinformation is why Donald Trump won simply do not get it. "There's a profound lack of empathy in asserting that the only reason why someone could have voted the way that they did is because they saw some fake news," Zuckerberg says.

He also says his company has studied fake news and found it's a "very small volume" of the content on Facebook. He did not specify if that content is more or less viral or impactful than other information.

Denials of a dangerously lax attitude to risk in Facebook Inc.'s business model continued to be made as more information surfaced......

BuzzFeed, 30 March 2018

The Age, 31 March 2018:

In a 2016 employee memo that was leaked this week, a Facebook executive defended the company's questionable data mining practices and championed the growth of social media at any cost - apparently even death.

Users in the US sue Facebook for not protecting personal data of the 50 million social network account owners whose data ended up at the political consulting firm Cambridge Analytica.

"Maybe it costs a life by exposing someone to bullies," company vice president Andrew Bosworth wrote in the memo, according to BuzzFeed News, which published it Thursday. "Maybe someone dies in a terrorist attack coordinated on our tools. And still we connect people. The ugly truth is that we believe in connecting people so deeply that anything that allows us to connect more people more often is *de facto* good."….

Bosworth, who oversaw Facebook's advertising and business platform at the time and is now in charge of the company's virtual reality department, has acknowledged writing the message but said he intended only to start a debate. "I didn't agree with it even when I wrote it," he wrote on Twitter after BuzzFeed published its report.

Facebook chief executive Mark Zuckerberg, who is already facing a public relations crisis over accusations that the company mishandled millions of users' private data, disavowed the memo.

"Boz is a talented leader who says many provocative things," Zuckerberg said in a statement, using Bosworth's nickname. "This was one that most people at Facebook including myself disagreed with strongly. We've never believed the ends justify the means."…….

The 418-word memo is framed around Zuckerberg's often-stated mission to connect the entire world through Facebook, which Bosworth cites as the company's ultimate and unchangeable goal - whether those connections let users fall in love, attack each other or, in the memo's most extreme example, coordinate a terrorist attack.

"That's why all the work we do in growth is justified," Bosworth wrote. "All the questionable contact importing practices. All the subtle language that helps people stay searchable by friends. All of the work we do to bring more communication in. The work we will likely have to do in China some day. All of it."

BuzzFeed noted that the memo was written almost immediately after a man was shot to death while streaming live video of himself with Facebook Live, and a few days before a Palestinian teenager was accused of killing an Israeli girl after praising terrorists on Facebook.

These deaths were a prelude to a string of other gruesome and violent incidents that appeared in videos and live streams on the social network. A man posted a Facebook video of himself killing someone last April. A month later, a man soaked himself in kerosene, lit himself on fire and used Facebook Live to stream video of his self-immolation.

Then we saw Zuckerberg donning a suit as he did the rounds in Washington DC. Appearing before a Joint Senate Committees on the Judiciary & Commerce, Science, and Transportation’s  Facebook, Social Media Privacy, and the Use and Abuse of Data hearing and a House of Representatives Energy and Commerce Committee's Facebook: Transparency and Use of Consumer Data hearing.

There was an expectation that during these hearings Zuckerberg would reveal the full extent of Facebook's data collection and retention, as well as explain why he allowed third party apps to collect data without the knowledge and/or fully informed consent of up to est, 2 billion Facebook users.

His disingenuous witness statement published ahead of his appearances contains this gem:

Facebook is an idealistic and optimistic company. For most of our existence, we focused on all the good that connecting people can bring.....

But it’s clear now that we didn’t do enough to prevent these tools from being used for harm as well. That goes for fake news, foreign interference in elections, and hate speech, as well as developers and data privacy. We didn’t take a broad enough view of our responsibility, and that was a big mistake. It was my mistake, and I’m sorry. I started Facebook, I run it, and I’m responsible for what happens here. So now we have to go through every part of our relationship with people and make sure we’re taking a broad enough view of our responsibility.

However, if one reads through the full witness statement it is clear that Facebook Inc. is not responding out of a genuine realisation of its ethical failures or wrongdoing, but is essentially responding to the sharp fall in its stock value which began last month.

It clearly intends to still allow third party apps access to Facebook user accounts and there is no guarantee that the amount of personal data that can be extracted by these apps will be limited to a digital version of 'name, rank and serial number' or that Facebook users will have given fully-informed consent for this data extraction.

This reading of Facebook Inc.'s intentions was reinforced by Mark Zuckerberg testimony before both the Senate and House committees.

He came obviously rehearsed by lawyers and tightly scripted......

Time Magazine, Facebook aide closing notes during hearing recess,11 April 2018

Brief summary of Mark Zuckerber notes here.

Although in his spoken testimony Zuckerberg commenced with yet another apology, in my opinion he frequently dissembled, mislead, misdirected, contradicted a number of his own and Facebook management's public previous statements, lied by omission and sometimes almost defiantly told what appeared to be bald-faced lies.

NOTE: Readers can form their own opinion of Zuckerberg's testimony courtesy of The Washington Post at https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-switch/wp/2018/04/10/transcript-of-mark-zuckerbergs-senate-hearing/?noredirect=on&utm_term=.032d3cf2a0e8 
& https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-switch/wp/2018/04/11/transcript-of-zuckerbergs-appearance-before-house-committee/?utm_term=.cd5f1228fec4.

However Facebook Inc. is not just relying on its founder and CEO's recent testimony to ward of further regulation of its businss practices.

Since 2011 Facebook Inc. has had a registered Political Action Commttee (PAC) which has donated to the 2012, 2014, and 2016 US election campaigns. 

As well as in-house and paid lobbyists who spent in total US$11.5 million in 2017 alone fighting against further Internet regulations including any proposed strengthening of privacy protections. Add that to the company's US$8.6M lobbying spend in 2016, $9.8M in 2015, $9.3M in 2014, $6.4M in 2013, $3.8M in 2012, $1.3M in 2011, $351,390 in 2010 and $207,878 in 2009 and one can see that Facebook Inc. is increasingly determined to have the ear of US lawmakers.

Although how successful the social media giant's lobbying efforts on Capitol Hill will be in 2018, it is clear that in has been partially successful in protecting the market value of its shares.

To date this year Facebook Inc.'s ordinary share price has gone from a closing high of US$193.09 (01.02.18) to a low of $152.22 (27.03.18) in the wake of revelations about the company's business practices and, then gradually climbed over the course of 17 days by $12.3 to close at $164.52 (13.03.18), according to Yahoo! Finance.

As for the number of active Facebook users - only time will tell if current figures hold over time. With trust in Facebook Inc. at a new low it will not be surprising to find the number of accounts showing daily activity falling over time as users become more wary of this platform.