Image source, getty images facebook will pay a record $5bn fine to settle privacy concerns, the us federal trade commission (ftc) has said. The social network must also establish an independent privacy committee that facebook's chief executive mark zuckerberg will not have control over. The ftc had been probing allegations political consultancy cambridge analytica improperly obtained the data of up to 87 million facebook users. The probe then widened to include other issues such as facial recognition. The $5bn fine is believed to be the biggest ever imposed on any company for violating consumers' privacy. "despite repeated promises to its billions of users worldwide that they could control how their personal information is shared, facebook undermined consumers' choices," said ftc chairman joe simons. include

Facebook remains the center of attention over concerns about data privacy and sharing. How are schools reckoning with how they use the social media platform? education week reporter benjamin herold discusses on pbs newshour:.

Check out the full terms & conditions archive. Welcome to the first edition of terms & conditions, a weekly column where we break down the tangled mess of online sites’ and services’ terms of service, privacy policies, and other lawyerly mumbojumbo, into language anyone can understand. This week, we’re tackling a doosey: facebook’s privacy policy, also known as the “ data use policy. ”given its history of brushing aside users’ privacy concerns, facebook has broken its data use policy into multiple parts, in an apparent attempt to make it easier to understand. It has also excluded many of the enigmatic legal phrases often used in privacy policies.

User data concerns [ edit ]

User data concerns[ edit ] widening exposure of member information 2011–2012[ edit ] in 2010, the electronic frontier foundation identified two personal information aggregation techniques called "connections" and "instant personalization". training They demonstrated that anyone could get access to information saved to a facebook profile, even if the information was not intended to be made public. A "connection" is created when a user clicks a "like" button for a product or service, either on facebook itself or an external site. Facebook treats such relationships as public information, and the user's identity may be displayed on the facebook page of the product or service.

We systematically examined the semantic contexts in which information privacy terms appear according to the word embeddings. We focused our investigation on four keywords in english: information, privacy, users, and company and their corresponding translations in spanish: información, privacidad, usuarios, and empresa. For each embedding, we retrieved the closest terms to the four keywords. The closeness between each term and a keyword was measured using cosine similarity. For instance, the closest terms for the keyword information in the english word embedding were info, data, details, and personal, in that order (see figure 2). Then, we evaluated differences in information privacy concerns across language and world regions.

Health data from apps sent to Facebook without user consent [ edit ]

Two facebook users are suing the social media platform’s parent company, meta platforms inc. , for allegedly skirting around apple's privacy protections and collecting user data through in-app browsers. The proposed class-action complaint filed wednesday in san francisco federal court comes after an apple ios update in april 2021 forced meta to obtain users’ consent before tracking their internet activity on apps and third-party websites. The lawsuits accuse meta of working around the update by tracking users’ online activity through facebook's in-app browser. By directing users who click a link in the facebook app to an in-app browser instead of their smartphone’s default browser, facebook can track their internet activity and collect personally identifiable information, private health details, text entries and other sensitive confidential facts, the lawsuits say.

2010 application privacy breach [ edit ]

Facebook has had to deal with a lot of issues when it comes to keeping the privacy of its users intact. In 2006, being just barely two years old the company faced its first user outrage when it introduced its news feed. A year after it had apologized for telling users what their friends had bought and more recently the breaching of data privacy rules and regulations. In its 14years of existence, facebook has had a history of running afoul of regulators and angering its users while racking up over 2 billion users and collecting record profits. Since the number of iot (internet of things) devices grew from 500 million in 2003 to 30.

Facebook and Cambridge Analytica data scandal [ edit ]

Facebook has brought data abuse to the top of everyone's minds. But the truth about facebook’s data privacy struggles? they are a part of a much bigger, industry-wide problem. First, it was the cambridge analytica scandal in which the third-party data firm had harvested the data of some 87 million facebook users and used it to shape political outcomes in elections in both the u. S. And the u. K. More recently, facebook executed the suspension of 200 apps pending what the company called a "thorough investigation into whether they did in fact misuse any data. " apps that were found to have misused data will be banned, the company said.

Facebook’s repeated data breaches are precisely what the general data protection regulation tried to address with its explicit guidelines about reporting breaches. Facebook’s haphazard response has it facing a fine of over $1. 6 billion. Facebook is getting to know privacy legislation pretty well. It has already been fined £500,000 for its involvement in the cambridge analytica scandal, the maximum amount allowed under the uk’s old data protection act of 1998. Now that the gdpr is in place, facebook could face a fine of up to 4 percent of its annual global turnover which, based on its performance over the past fiscal year, could amount to $1.

The third party mentioned is the now-defunct british political consultancy firm cambridge analytica, which came under a bit of controversy during elections held in india as well. There was no comment either from facebook or from any of the plaintiffs. The allegation in the facebook -cambridge analytica data scandal was that facebook provided access to the private data of 67 million facebook users, which was used for voter profiling. It was alleged that personal data belonging to millions of facebook users was collected in the 2010s without their consent through an app called "this is your digital life". The app asked a series of questions to users to build their psychological profile, and collected the personal data of the users’ friends on facebook friends via the open graph platform.

By james hale • 03/06/2019 • since the 2016 election and the cambridge analytica scandal , facebook has been under near-constant scrutiny over the way it handles users’ private data. Its privacy problems didn’t just start in 2016, though; going back to its public debut in 2006, facebook has faced a significant number of data privacy-related issues. The latest came yesterday, with the reveal (from new york times security researcher zeynep tufekci) that if a facebook user provides their phone number solely for secure two-factor login authentication, any other user can then look them up using that phone number. In handling privacy issues, facebook has consistently chosen not to do anything to limit the massive amount of data it collects about users, or to better regulate what happens to that data.