From The Straits Times:
Facebook will roll out a centralised system for its users to control their privacy and security settings in fewer taps following an outcry over the way it has handled personal data.
The system, which will be introduced to Facebook users globally over the coming weeks, will allow people to change their privacy and security settings from one place rather than having to go to roughly 20 separate sections across the social media platform.
The company also announced that it will end its partnerships with several large data brokers which help advertisers target people on the social network.
The world’s largest social media company is under pressure to improve its handling of data after disclosing that information about 50 million Facebook users wrongly ended up in the hands of British political consultancy Cambridge Analytica.
The privacy settings will be clustered on a new page from where users can control the personal information the social network keeps on them, such as their political preferences or interests.
They can also download and review a file of data Facebook has collected about them. In addition, Facebook will clarify what types of apps people are currently using and what permissions those apps have to gather their information.
. . . .
“The last week showed how much more work we need to do to enforce our policies, and to help people understand how Facebook works and the choices they have over their data,” Facebook’s chief privacy officer Erin Egan and deputy general counsel Ashlie Beringer said in a statement on Wednesday announcing the new system.
. . . .
“The platform made similar promises many times before,” said Ms Zeynep Tufekci, an associate professor at the University of North Carolina who studies how technology affects society.
She pointed out that in 2010, Mr Zuckerberg said in The Washington Post that Facebook users needed simpler controls over their privacy and had promised then that Facebook would “add privacy controls that are much simpler to use”. Yet, eight years later, the same concerns have resurfaced, she said.
Link to the rest at The Straits Times
@ Joe Vasicek – sorry, ran out of reply buttons.
‘It’s not about advertising. It’s about surveillance.’
I cannot tell you how shocked I am. Who or what would be interested in what someone says while watching TV? I mean, what possible, /commercial/ interest could there be?
There are reasons.
For starters, the quality of voice recognition is a function of the number of samples of voices and words a system knows. Accents and voice tones vary so capturing words not in the database is a cheap way to expand the database to improve the system. Finding enough good samples of “foreign” languages isn’t cheap so a less scrupulous company might bug their first gen products to accumulate samples for the next iteration to enable more commands and features.
It’s not impossible.
But some of the angst is exagerated:
https://mashable.com/2015/02/10/smart-devices-listening/#aFIhaLKw1kqA
Let’s just say, there’s a reason I own guns and keep food storage.
“Facebook to simplify privacy controls amid anger over breach”
Too bad they’ll go on selling your data …
They’ll also go on collecting that data via every ‘Like’ button on the internet, and you don’t even need to click that button to be tracked. Just visiting the website is enough. 🙁
This has been open knowledge for years. It’s why Adblock Plus has an option for disabling social media buttons.
Forgive me, but it has not been ‘open knowledge for years’. Just because you are aware of something does not mean that 99% of the rest of the population /of the world/ also has the same knowledge and chooses to ignore it.
And for the record, I don’t use Adblock much less Adblock Plus.
There are a surprising number of things that are open knowledge that almost no one knows about. Frightening, disturbing, dangerous things.
Facebook gave all their data to the Obama campaign in 2016. They passed it directly to the campaign. In post election panels the campaign openly said so, and took credit for doing it. Facebook gave them the data directly.
A second reason this is an issue now is the struggle between news outlets and Facebook/Google. If the news outlets can hurt FB, they stand to benefit. Watch for this to spread to encompass Google. Not sure about Amazon. they have lots of data, but does any of it come from sources other than consumer Amazon purchases?
2012.
Or has it been confirmed they also gave data to Clinton?
No surprise if they did, of course. Nobody in techland wants to get on the wrong side of the Clintons after what tbey did to Microsoft.
As for Amazon, they have an ad business. And they get click-through data from affiliate links and searches. So they know more than just what you buy.
Yes.It was 2012 when FB gave the Obama campaign the data directly. I haven’t seen anything about FB data and Clinton in 2016.
There were shenanigans in 2016 as well. The exact words from Podesta to Facebook’s COO were “Look forward to working with you to elect the first woman President of the United States.” Her exact words to him were “And I still want HRC to win badly. I am still here to help as I can.”
Source
I wonder how many people remember that Google scans all incoming and outgoing messages through gmail? Their excuse is that no human ever sees the message itself, they’re just mining for key words and phrases.
Me, I stick to my paid email account. They’re almost playing their own games but so far they haven’t sold me. Yet.
It needs to be a mantra: “If you’re not the paying customer, you’re the product.”
(Sometimes both.)
And that one was widely reported and discussed when Gmail debuted.
And promptly forgotten by the very people who will be incensed if they find out how Google makes billions off that data.
I believe the term is “willful ignorance”.
“If you’re not the paying customer, you’re the product.”
Yes. I play games online and one of them, at least, states in its privacy policy that it shares player data with both Facebook and Google. I don’t pay the premium subscription, but I did buy the game. I suspect it doesn’t matter whether you pay or not, not any more. The data game has become too enticing for any of these companies to stop.
The thing I can’t understand is why. Why go to such lengths in order to foster advertising when [almost] everyone hates it and ignores it?
Because there is money in it, of course.
And because people love “free”.
They’ll put up with a lot for “free”.
All those services offered by Facebook and Google were previously available as paid services and software. All but one killed off by “free”.
The people voted with their clicks and what they got is what they paid with. A deal’s a deal.
TANSTAFL!
It’s not about advertising. It’s about surveillance.
When my roommate bought his smart TV, he dismantled it first in order to remove the microphone. It was not advertised as having one. There is no option in the software to enable it.
Big Brother is watching.
From everything I’ve heard or read, FB ignored what settings you were allowed to make. Not assured that will change.
In the past they’ve also reset your settings without saying a word about it. The king still has no clothes on …
Source
The problem never was Facebook’s UI for privacy settings, it’s that now we all know the company doesn’t have our best interests at heart, and that we can’t trust it to protect our privacy. (Some of us always knew it.)
You can’t walk that back with a PR announcement and a UI change. Frankly I’m not sure that Zuck himself stepping down and appointing a Trust and Privacy Board would even help at this point.
We knew that years before, though. At least, those of us who pay attention to this sort of thing.
The problem is blowback from our toxic politics: specifically, the fact that so many people are still in denial that Trump won the 2016 elections because Clinton was a terrible candidate. Instead, they’ve been looking for something else to blame: Comey, fake news, the Russians, etc—never mind that after sixteen months, they’ve failed to find conclusive evidence for any of their conspiracy theories.
Lately, they discovered that Cambridge Analytica used Facebook to acquire large amounts of personal data and use it to benefit the Trump campaign. Never mind that Obama’s campaign did the same thing in 2012. The Cambridge Analytica whistleblower himself admitted that he wouldn’t have come forward if Clinton had won. Now Facebook has become the latest collateral damage in a political witch hunt that began on 9 November 2016.
Don’t get me wrong, Facebook is garbage on privacy issues and abuse of personal data. But it’s only an issue now because the wrong guy became president.
‘Don’t get me wrong, Facebook is garbage on privacy issues and abuse of personal data. But it’s only an issue now because the wrong guy became president.’
Um no. Believe it or not, Facebook users include a lot of people from that great big hole called the ‘rest of the world’. We care about your President, but only in so far as POTUS affects /us/.
The rest of the world cares about the Facebook debacle because it is shining a harsh light on the covert surveillance taken for granted by almost all large online companies. Those companies also include Google, Twitter and Amazon, to name just a few.
The rest of the world is angry because none of us knew how far-reaching and all-pervasive the surveillance had become.
This is no longer about ‘naive’ users who blurt their entire lives onto social media. This is about the development of tech that is capable of collecting, storing and analysing unimaginable amounts of data. It is also about the sharing of that data between digital predators. And finally, it’s about a corporate culture that assumes anything and anyone is fair game in the pursuit of the almighty dollar.
You should have been paying attention, then. All of these surveillance issues and potential abuses of private data were revealed years ago, not only by Edward Snowden, but by Facebook itself. Their decision to download browser histories, even of people who don’t have a Facebook account, was what prompted me to delete my account in 2014.
You’re right, I should have known, but as I’ve always hated Facebook, it simply hasn’t blipped on my radar. Just as most people have no clue about self-publishing, I had no clue about Facebook. Until now. And the thing that makes me see red is that my dislike of Facebook hasn’t/won’t protect me from its tentacles and the uses to which this industry-wide surveillance is put.
And then there’s Google. It’s as bad, if not worse than Facebook, and even Amazon is in on the act. I’m thrilled that Cambridge Analytica finally exposed the whole, sick culture for everyone to see. Now, at least, we all know what we face.
I’ve deleted my data from Google, as much as possible, and I’ve stopped using it. Next, I’ll work through every single company I interact with online. Finally, I’ll shout it from the rooftops because this peeping tom mentality has to stop. For everyone.
Um no. Believe it or not, Facebook users include a lot of people from that great big hole called the ‘rest of the world’.
Facebook is an American company that serves the whole world. This issue arose in the context of the 2016 US presidential election.
The same thing happened to a greater extent in the US 2012 election, but it did not become an issue. Instead, people congratulated the folks in 2016 for their sophisticated use of social media.
However, in the 2016 election, we had a winner of a different political persuasion, and it is suddenly a serious issue. It’s reasonable to conclude the respective winners of the 2012 and 2016 election are a significant factor in the rise of the issue.
The issue may affect the rest of the world, but it arose specifically because of a US election.
CORRECTION:
The same thing happened to a greater extent in the US 2012 election, but it did not become an issue. Instead, people congratulated the folks in ***2012*** for their sophisticated use of social media.
I wasn’t aware of the 2012 connection, but of course I’m aware of the 2016/Cambridge Analytica connection. My point, however, has to do with Joe’s comment:
‘Don’t get me wrong, Facebook is garbage on privacy issues and abuse of personal data. But it’s ONLY an issue now because the wrong guy became president.’
I capitalised the ‘only’ to make it obvious.
Whether he meant to or not, Joe seemed to imply that the issue was only of interest because of the political situation in the US. My fury is at the broader issues underlying the election result because…I. did. not. know.
It is, though. The only reason large numbers of people are actively taking interest in Facebook’s abuses of private data, which have been going on for years, is because the wrong guy is in the White House. If Hillary had won, it would not have made the news cycle.
If what you both say is accurate then I’m so glad you-know-who won the election. It’s been a tremendous wake up call for me, yet I believe the majority of users are still unaware of the true situation. Because it isn’t ‘just’ political. This goes to the heart of everything that Americans seem to hold dear – i.e. freedom. What’s the point of free speech when your every move is being recorded and spied upon?
It became an issue because the wrong guy won the election. After that catalyst, many have taken an interest.
Had someone else won the election, I suspect we would have had a repeat of the 2012 situation, with little interest from anyone.
And you would not know if the whistleblower hasn’t come forth with the accusation (which turned out to be wrong, to boot) that the Facebook data had been used to get the wrong guy into the White House. If the “correct” person had been elected using that data, like in 2012, the whistleblower would have kept quiet and kept on using the data themselves.
The intent wasn’t to make Facebook change their policies but to delegitimize the election because, of course, any election that puts even a fake republican in the white house has to be by despicable trickery, whether it be “Willie Horton” ads, hijinks in Florida, or russian meddling. And when it turned out the russians also meddled for Sanders and against Trump, the narrative turned to “it was Facebook’s fault”.
Anything to pin the blame on.
American media needs critical reading to appreciate what they are saying, when it comes to presidential politics.
Which isn’t to say Facebook hasn’t been selling user data at bargain prices. Just that the media knew and didn’t care until they could use it as a political weapon. (Mostly because big media is also a Facebook customer.)
No clean hands.
No good guys anywhere in this affair.
Just mudslinging political agendas at work.