The Facebook consent agreement requires them to ask users for permission to share their data. The NY Times tonight says documents and interviews show Facebook instead opened a firehose of data for preferred partners and big business, and did not ask users for permission. It’s way past time for Facebook to say they’re sorry. They’ve done that many times before, then didn’t change. Facebook needs new top management. There needs to be serious consequences for their behavior. Because the privacy violations here are egregious.
Silicon Valley is about to learn what happens when government impose laws and penalties. It’s time for criminal investigations too. Why did Facebook continue sharing data with Russian search engines Yandex after stopping that sharing with other entities? What did the the companies they shared data with do with the data and what did Facebook get in return?
Internal documents show that the social network gave Microsoft, Amazon, Spotify and others far greater access to people’s data than it has disclosed.
Facebook allowed Microsoft’s Bing search engine to see the names of virtually all Facebook users’ friends without consent, the records show, and gave Netflix and Spotify the ability to read Facebook users’ private messages.
The social network permitted Amazon to obtain users’ names and contact information through their friends, and it let Yahoo view streams of friends’ posts as recently as this summer, despite public statements that it had stopped that type of sharing years earlier.
But the documents, as well as interviews with about 50 former employees of Facebook and its corporate partners, reveal that Facebook allowed certain companies access to data despite those protections. They also raise questions about whether Facebook ran afoul of a 2011 consent agreement with the Federal Trade Commission that barred the social network from sharing user data without explicit permission.