Facebook and its founder Mark Zuckerberg are facing legal problems on multiple fronts these days. There's the class-action complaint alleging lax security measures increased users' risk of identity theft, following the 2018 hack of 50 million user accounts.1,2 Then there's the U.S. Federal Trade Commission (FTC) probe into Facebook's compliance with a 2011 consent agreement to safeguard users' personal information, which has been ongoing for the past year. According to Fortune Magazine,3 if the company is found to have violated the agreement, fines amounting to hundreds of millions of dollars may be levied. According to a March 4, 2019, report by Wired,4 the U.S. House Judiciary Committee is also conducting an investigation looking for links between Cambridge Analytica, Russia, President Trump and WikiLeaks. In addition to that, the FTC recently launched a second criminal investigation into the company's controversial data sharing practices. Top executives are also leaving the company — a sign that the rats are fleeing from Facebook's sinking ship. Among them are Facebook's chief product officer, Chris Fox, who has been with the company for 13 years, and Chris Daniels, vice president of WhatsApp, a position he's held only since May.5,6 FTC Probe No. 1The first, still ongoing, FTC investigation revolves around the Cambridge Analytica scandal, where it was discovered Facebook allowed a British political consulting firm access to some 87 million Facebook users' data, which was allegedly used in an effort to sway public opinion in the U.S. presidential election. As reported by Fortune last year:7
Facebook insists it did not violate the consent agreement, and that Cambridge Analytica obtained user data through an app developer who violated Facebook's policies.8 According to Facebook, Cambridge Analytica told them the data would be used for academic purposes only. However, according to a recent The New York Times report,9 "the fine print accompanying a quiz app that collected the information said it could also be used commercially." Facebook also does not appear to have had a verification protocol in place to make sure app developers were complying with Facebook's data sharing rules. New Criminal Probe UnderwayAll of that is now coming to a head as yet another criminal investigation into Facebook's data sharing deals gets underway.10 According to The New York Times,11 a federal grand jury is looking at partnerships that gave tech companies and device makers broad access to Facebook users' information," and Facebook may now be facing FTC fines in the billions rather than hundreds of millions.12 Facebook stands accused of providing "deep access to users' personal information" to a wide variety of business partners, allowing these companies to override privacy settings set by the user to access their data. This, despite Facebook claiming it discontinued this practice in 2015. According to The New York Times:13
Zuckerberg Reveals Plan to Morph Facebook Into Encrypted Messaging PlatformDespite a clear history of rampant privacy violations, Zuckerberg has now unveiled his latest plan for Facebook, saying the company will be shifting away from being a platform for public sharing, toward "encrypted, ephemeral communications,"14 meaning messages would not only be encrypted, but they would also be automatically deleted after a certain amount of time (unless the user opted to store it longer). As explained in the video commentary by Verge,15 above, there are benefits and drawbacks to the plan — if anything actually comes from it — and governments and law enforcement are likely to resist its implementation. Zuckerberg's plan was detailed in a March 6, 2019, blog post.16
Ironically, it was recently discovered that Facebook was storing millions of user passwords in readable plaintext format (opposed to hashed) on an internal data storage system — a truly basic security mistake. To protect your account, you may want to update your password, just in case. Wired writes:17
Zuckerberg's Views on Privacy Shift With the WindWhile that sounds all good and well, one has to seriously question the validity of what Zuckerberg is saying, as he has repeatedly demonstrated a complete lack of integrity when it comes to fulfilling promises of privacy. He doesn't even seem to understand the bare basics of privacy, and has been caught speaking out of both sides of his mouth on more than one occasion. For example, in a 2010 talk given at the Crunchie awards, he stated that "privacy is no longer a social norm,"18 implying that social networking online automatically meant you could no longer have an expectation of privacy, and that the company decided to change the privacy settings of its then 350 million users because "we decided that these would be the social norms now and we just went for it."19 Comments like that strongly suggest that he never took privacy seriously, and all his recent talk is merely a feeble attempt to rescue his deeply troubled company. Zuckerberg simply decided that zero privacy was the "new social norm" and "just went for it," implementing changes that stripped users of the right to expect privacy in the first place. Since then, Facebook has grown from 350 million users to 2.32 billion,20 all of whom are being invasively tracked across multiple platforms owned not just by Facebook but also its various business partners. And while some might argue that if you decide to join Facebook's "free" service, you simply have to expect and accept that you're going to be tracked and have your personal data sold in hundreds of different ways, the problem with that argument is that Facebook has become such a gigantic monopoly that if you want to communicate with a group of family or friends, you have little choice but to join Facebook, because that's where everyone is. Facebook also isn't just Facebook anymore. It also owns other massive platforms, including Instagram, Messenger and WhatsApp. Last year, WhatsApp co-founder Brian Acton told CBS News he "sold [his] users' privacy" when he agreed to sell the company to Facebook back in 2014.21 "I made a choice and a compromise. And I live with that every day," he said. According to reports, Facebook is now planning to merge the three platforms,22 which "will make Facebook more difficult to break up and spin off, as has been proposed by governments and regulators," Express reported back on January 26.23 Some suspect the March 13, 2019, outage that simultaneously took down Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp for about 14 hours may actually have been related to this as-yet unacknowledged metadata merger. Officially, Facebook blamed the outage on a "server configuration change" that ended up affecting the company's apps and services across the board.24 "Was the outage a result of Facebook trying to combine systems and get ahead of regulators, especially when this month, an open debate opened up over whether Facebook's takeover of Instagram and WhatsApp should be rolled back?" Packt asks.25 Similarly, The Register suggested:26
Privacy Emphasis Likely a Red HerringThe integration of Messenger, WhatsApp and Instagram is a move that has been criticized by some tech experts, as it may further tighten the proverbial noose around users. As pointed out by Ari Ezra Waldman in a Slate article that is well worth reading in its entirety, although I'm quoting a larger than normal portion of it here for your convenience:27
Facebook's Monopoly Must Be Broken UpIn an MIT Technology Review article,28 Konstantin Kakaes also calls Zuckerberg's essay "a power grab disguised as an act of contrition," stating that "it's impossible to escape the conclusion that if privacy is to be protected in any meaningful way, Facebook must be broken up." He goes on to point out:
German Antitrust Regulator Puts the Brakes on Facebook's Unrestricted Data MiningFebruary 7, 2019, Forbes29 reported the German antitrust regulator, Bundeskartellamt, has become the first to prohibit "the cross-application data sharing that underpins Facebooks's advertising business model." According to Bundeskartellamt:
With this decision, none of Facebook's services will be permissible in Germany if or when the company integrates its three messaging platforms. Should other countries follow suit, the Facebook, WhatsApp, Instagram messaging integration would fall through — as it probably should. As mentioned, Facebook is not only a national monopoly, it's a global one, and by integrating Instagram and WhatsApp, it further consolidates two additional monopolies into what you could call a global super-monopoly with unprecedented (and likely unfathomable) data mining capabilities, which hurts both consumers and industries. Facebook Caught Censoring Sen. Elizabeth Warren's PostsU.S. presidential candidate Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., has become an outspoken proponent of breaking up monopolies such as Amazon, Facebook and Google, and has vowed to introduce "sweeping new regulation of Silicon Valley," should she be elected president, the Los Angeles Times reports.30 A detailed outline of her plan can be found in her March 8, 2019, article on Medium.31
As you probably know, Facebook has promised to combat "fake news" on its platform, but it appears this censorship doesn't end at blatantly fake news articles — far from it. Information that is unfavorable to Facebook (or its advertisers) keeps getting censored out as well — including Warren's campaign to break up Facebook's monopoly. Three of Warren's ads were reportedly removed by Facebook, with a message saying the ads were deleted because they went "against Facebook's advertising policies." Warren took to Twitter to comment on the removal, saying this is an example of why her proposal is so sorely needed. Facebook reinstated her ads with a comment saying they were removed because they included Facebook's logo, which violates Facebook's advertising policy. It's a rather lame excuse for what appears to be blatant censorship of information that would hurt the company. I've Decided — Mercola.com Will Leave FacebookA while back, I issued a poll to see how you felt about my leaving Facebook. The results are now in, with a majority agreeing with my decision to withdraw from the platform. While it will not take effect immediately, I am making plans to close my account, so, if you're not yet a subscriber to my newsletter, I urge you, your friends and family to sign up now. My newsletter is published daily, and subscribing will ensure you get three daily articles delivered straight into your email inbox (all listed in one email). >>>>> Click Here <<<<< At present, we have nearly 1.8 million Facebook followers and I'd like to give everyone some time to transition over to becoming newsletter subscribers before we close down shop on Facebook. The idea that I'm contributing to the invasive data mining of that many people has never sat well with me, and I feel leaving the platform and going back to depending on email is the responsible way forward. from http://articles.mercola.com/sites/articles/archive/2019/03/27/facebook-criminal-investigation.aspx
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