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Content Type: Examples
In June 2015, the Belgian data protection regulator, Commission for the Protection of Privacy, launched a complaint that Facebook indiscriminately tracked internet users when they visited Facebook pages or clicked Like or Share, even when they are not Facebook members. In November 2015, the Court of First Instance gave Facebook 48 hours to stop tracking internet users who do not have accounts with the social network or face fines of up to €250,000 per day. The court said Facebook tracked users…
Content Type: Examples
In January 2013, Facebook upgraded its search tool to enable the site to answer more complex questions. Called Graph Search, the new tool aimed to make it possible for users to find businesses and each other based on location, personal history, personal interests, and mutual friends. The site promised special privacy protections for minors. Privacy advocates pointed out the risks of making shared information discoverable on a large scale. Facebook's response was to suggest that users adjust…
Content Type: Examples
In May 2017, the French data protection regular, CNIL, fined Facebook €150,000 saying the company had failed to inform users properly about how their personal data is tracked and shared with advertisers. The regulator did not, however, order the company to change its practices. The decision was one of a series of European regulatory examinations of changes made to Facebook's privacy policy in 2014. CNIL's action followed rulings in 2016, when CNIL gave Facebook three months to stop tracking non…
Content Type: Examples
In 2015, Facebook created the "Free Basics" programme, in which the company partnered with telephone carriers in various countries to offer free access to Facebook - that is, using Facebook would not count against their data plan. While critics argued the plan is anti-competitive, violates the principles of network neutrality and didn't empower users to build their own culturally and contextually appropriate solutions, Facebook claimed that the service would help get India's hundreds of…
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In July 2014, a study conducted by Adam D. I. Kramer (Facebook), Jamie E. Guillory, and Jeffrey T. Hancock (both Cornell University) and published by the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences alerted Facebook users to the fact that for one week in 2012 689,003 of them had been the subjects of research into "emotional contagion". In the study, the researchers changed randomly selected users' newsfeeds to be more positive or negative to study whether those users then displayed a more…
Content Type: Examples
In 2012, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg's sister, Randi, tweeted to fellow Twitter user Callie Schweitzer that Schweitzer had violated her privacy by posting a picture taken in her kitchen. Randi Zuckerberg, the former head of Facebook's marketing department, had posted the picture, which was taken in her kitchen and showed four people including her brother, to Facebook intending it to be viewed by Friends only. Schweitzer responded that the picture had popped up in her Facebook News Feed. Randi…
Content Type: Examples
In November 2011, the US Federal Trade Commission charged Facebook with repeatedly breaking the privacy promises it made to users. Among the list of deceptive practices and incidents in the FTC's complaint were December 2009 changes Facebook made to its site that publicly exposed information users might have marked private, such as their Friends lists; Facebook's failure to certify the security of apps participating in its Verified Apps programme, as the company said it would; the company's…
Content Type: Examples
In June 2011, Facebook enabled an automatic facial recognition called "Tag Suggestions" based on its research project DeepFace, requiring users who objected to opt out. The feature scanned the faces in newly uploaded photographs and compared them to those in the billions of images already on the system. When it found what it believed to be a match, it would suggest tags - that is, names.
Privacy advocates noted that besides the issue that all users were opted in by default, the feature meant…
Content Type: Examples
In early 2011, Facebook launched "Sponsored Stories", an advertising product that used content from members' posts inside ads displayed on the service. Drawing on Likes, check-ins, and comments, a Sponsored Story might use a member's photograph and their comments from a coffee shop to create an ad that would then be displayed alongside other ads. Users were provided no ability to opt out. Among the inaugural advertisers was Coca-Cola, and Starbucks featured in a marketing video Facebook made to…
Content Type: Examples
In October 2010, the Wall Street Journal discovered that apps on Facebook were sending identifying information such as the names of users and their Friends to myriad third-party app advertising and internet tracking companies. All of the ten most popular Facebook apps, including Zynga's FarmVille, Texas HoldEm Poker, and FrontierVille, were found to be transmitting personal information about their users' Friends to outside companies. While Facebook and defenders of online tracking argued that…
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When journalist Alex Hern needed to set up a Facebook account in order to manage the Guardian's technology page and other work-related things, he locked down its privacy settings so that the account's profile would not appear in searches and only Friends of Friends could add him as a friend. In October 2017, Hern discovered that these settings no longer applied: an update to Facebook's internal search engine gave users the ability to search the entire network. While private posts remained…
Content Type: Examples
In April 2010, Facebook launched a set of tools to enable websites to add a social layer by adding a Facebook frame to their pages. The company's three launch partners, Microsoft's Docs.com, Yelp, and Pandora, had access to a more comprehensive tool, Instant Personalization, which allowed them to look directly at individuals' Facebook profiles and use the public information presented there to provide a personalised experience such as playing music (Pandora) or restaurants (Yelp) that the person…
Content Type: Examples
In September 2007, Facebook, which from its 2004 founding had stressed the privacy of its user profiles and interactions, opened up its profiles to public search engines such as Google and Bing. Facebook's new "public listing search" allowed anyone to search for a particular person; such searches returned the name and profile picture of all members who had set their search privacy to "Everyone". The benefit to Facebook was to encourage non-users to sign up when they saw their friends and family…
Content Type: Examples
In July 2009 after an in-depth study of the site spurred by complaints from the Canadian Internet Policy and Public Interest Clinic at the University of Ottawa, Canada's Privacy Commissioner issued a ruling that Facebook was in direct violation of the country's privacy laws. Among the regulator's complaints: the company's privacy policies were often confusing, incomplete, and generally lacked transparency; the company did not make a reasonable effort to inform users how their private…
Content Type: Examples
In February 2008, users discovered that deleting their account from Facebook does not entirely remove it. Instead, the company's servers retained copies of the information in those accounts indefinitely even after those users telephoned the company to request full removal. The company argued that retaining the data benefits users by making it easy for them to resurrect their accounts later, should they choose to do so. Facebook's website did not make this clear; only users who contacted the…
Content Type: Examples
In November 2007, Facebook launched Beacon, an advertising programme that allowed third-party sites to include a script that passed Facebook notifications about users' activities on their sites such as purchases, auction bids, reviews, and game-playing. The service as originally designed offered no opportunity to opt out, and a public outcry ensued; many people did not want their activities broadcast automatically to all their Friends. Users also soon found that Beacon transmitted information…
Content Type: Examples
In 2006, Facebook redesigned its system to add News Feed and Mini-Feed features, which the company said were intended to give users information about their social world. The News Feed was designed to provide a constantly updated stream of stories including updates from each user's Friends and Facebook groups, along with news stories tailored to their interests. Mini-Feed collected each user's updates into a new section on their profile page. Almost immediately, public backlash forced company…
Content Type: Examples
Over the years from 2005, when Facebook was still known as "Thefacebook" and its membership was still limited to verifiable Harvard students, to 2010, Facebook changed its privacy policies many times. Over that time, the default circle of who could view users' data widened over time, first to include schools and local areas, then to the entire Facebook network, then to the wider internet, and finally to third-party apps and advertisers. Taken together, the story is one of a service that began…
Content Type: Long Read
Hasn't Facebook said it would give European data protection to all of their users?
Yes, but only in very vague language. In an initial reaction to the Cambridge Analytica scandal, Mark Zuckerberg declared that Facebook would apply the EU General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) “in spirit” to their 2 billion users worldwide. When questioned by members of the US Congress, Zuckerberg declared that "[a]ll the same controls will be available around the world". Representative Green sought…
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In March 2018, Facebook announced it was scrapping plans to show off new home products at its developer conference in May, in part because revelations about the use of internal advertising tools by Cambridge Analytica have angered the public. The new products were expected to include connected speakers with digital assistant and video chat; they are now undergoing a review to ensure that they incorporate the right approach to user data. At the developer conference the company will also explain…
Content Type: Examples
Users downloading their Facebook histories have been startled to find that the company has been collecting call and SMS data. The company has responded by saying users are in control of what's uploaded to Facebook. However, the company also says it's a widely used practice when users first sign in on their phones to a messaging or social media app to begin by uploading the phone's contact list. That data then becomes part of the company's friend recommendation algorithm. On versions of Android…
Content Type: Examples
The accuracy of Facebook's ad targeting sometimes leads users to believe that Facebook is spying on them by tapping the microphones in their phones. Facebook has denied the practice - and is likely telling the truth because uploading and scanning the amount of audio data such a system would involve an unattainable amount of processing power to understand context.
It sounds believable: Joanna Stern's mother told her to buy the decongestant Sudafed in the morning, and by afternoon she sees…
Content Type: Examples
In 2016, Facebook and its photo-sharing subsidiary Instagram rolled out a new reporting tool that lets users anonymously flag posts that suggest friends are threatening self-harm or suicide. The act of flagging the post triggers a message from Instagram to the user in question offering support including access to a help line and suggestions such as calling a friend. These messages are also triggered if someone searches the service for certain terms such as "thinspo", which is associated with…
Content Type: Examples
A former Facebook insider explains to Wired Magazine why it's almost certain that the Trump campaign's skill using the site's internal advertising infrastructure was more important in the 2016 US presidential election than Russia's troll farm was. The first was the ads auction; the second a little-known product called Custom Audience and its accompanying Lookalike Audiences. Like Google's equivalent, Facebook's auction has advertisers bid with an ad, an ideal user specification, and a bid for…
Content Type: Examples
In 2017, Facebook introduced two mechanisms intended to give users greater transparency about its data practices: the "why am I seeing this?" button users can click to get an explanation of why they're being shown a particular ad, and an Ad Preferences page that shows users a list of attributes the system has inferred about them. To examine the level of transparency provided by the respective ad explanations and data explanations these two mechanisms provide, a group of researchers conducted a…
Content Type: Examples
As of early 2018, Facebook's friends recommendations (People You May Know) are based on the address books users give them. However, Facebook has been filing patent applications for a new generation of technologies for collecting more information about its users and matching them more accurately. One, filed in 2014, describes technology to discern whether two people might know each other from smartphone data including location, accelerometer, and gyroscope readings, which show how often two…
Content Type: Examples
Research from ProPublica in December 2017 found that dozens of companies, including Verizon, Amazon, and Target are using Facebook to target job ads to exclude older workers. Excluding older workers is illegal under US law, but Facebook's system allows advertisers to specify precisely who should see their ads. Verizon, for example, specified that its effort to recruit applicants for a unit focused on financial planning and analysis would run on the Facebook feeds of users 25 to 36 years…
Content Type: Examples
Facebook and Twitter have advised Damian Collins, the chair of the UK Parliament's digital, culture, media, and sport committee, that the companies will hand over some information relating to the rearch of Russia-backed posts during the EU referendum. Facebook has already given the US Senate similar information about Russia-backed posts during the 2016 presidential election; this information showed that campaign ads and fake news generated by the Internet Research Agency troll factory in St…
Content Type: Examples
Among the friends Facebook recommended to Kashmir Hill as people she might know was Rebecca Porter, to the best of her knowledge a total stranger. Because Hill was studying how the "black box" of Facebook recommendations worked, she contacted Porter to ask what the connection might be. To her surprise, Porter turned out to be her great aunt by marriage, unknown to her because her biological grandfather had abandoned her father, who was adopted and never learned his biological history until…
Content Type: Examples
A mistake in Facebook's machine translation service led to the arrest and questioning of a Palestinian man by Israeli police. The man, a construction worker on the West Bank, posted a picture of himself leaning against a bulldozer like those that have been used in hit-and-run terrorist attacks, with a caption that correctly translates to "good morning". Facebook's AI translated it into "hurt them" in English or "attack them" in Hebrew. Based on that, police officers arrested him later that day…