Shadow-banning is a process that dates back to at least the 1980s, with Citadel BBS’s “twit bit,” which would allow users to post replies to forums that they could see, but no one else could see.
Continue reading “Facebook has filed a laughable patent-application for the well-known practice of “shadow banning””
Tag: #deletefacebook
Facebook’s $5B FTC fine was so laughable its stock price went UP after the announcement
In 2011, the US Federal Trade Commission put Facebook under consent decree after the company “deceived consumers by telling them they could keep their information on Facebook private, and then repeatedly [allowed] it to be shared and made public.”
Continue reading “Facebook’s $5B FTC fine was so laughable its stock price went UP after the announcement”
For years, the chief of the Border Patrol was a member of the secret CBP Facebook group for racist and threatening chatter
Last week, Propublica revealed the existence of “I’m 10-15”, a secret Facebook group for current and former Customs and Border Protection employees — a group with 9,500 members, while CBP’s total workforce numbers 58,000 — where it was commons for members to share violent, racist, sexist, misogynist, rape-y memes, including some that threatened and disparaged members of Congress.
Continue reading “For years, the chief of the Border Patrol was a member of the secret CBP Facebook group for racist and threatening chatter”
Zuck’s personal head of security resigns after allegations of homophobia, transphobia, “pervasive discriminatory conduct,” and “horrific levels of sexual harassment and battery”
Ex-Secret Service officer Liam Booth was the head of security for Mark Zuckerberg’s “family office” and charitable foundation; two former employees accused Booth of homophobia, transphobia, “pervasive discriminatory conduct,” and “horrific levels of sexual harassment and battery,” saying that he had made racist remarks about Zuckerberg’s wife, Priscilla Chan; that he had told a staffer that he “didn’t trust Black people” and that he believed that “white lives matter more than Black lives” and had personally sabotaged Chan’s attempt to hire more diverse staff; that he’d complained about the number of Black people working for the family charity; and that he’d “angrily advocat[ed] against diversity in the workplace and the movement Black Lives Matters, which he called ‘reverse racism.'”
Continue reading “Zuck’s personal head of security resigns after allegations of homophobia, transphobia, “pervasive discriminatory conduct,” and “horrific levels of sexual harassment and battery””
Tim Wu rebuts Zuck’s reasons for exempting Facebook from antitrust enforcement
Competition scholar and cyberlawyer Tim “Net Neutrality” Wu’s (previously) latest book is The Curse of Bigness: a tight, beautifully argued case for restoring pre-Reagan antitrust approaches.
Continue reading “Tim Wu rebuts Zuck’s reasons for exempting Facebook from antitrust enforcement”
Independent audit finds Facebook activity has fallen by 20% since Cambridge Analytica
The “business analytics” firm Mixpanel has released its figures estimating the total usage of Facebook (liking, sharing and posting) since the Cambridge Analytica scandal broke; they showed usage falling off 10% in the first month following from the news of the scandal, and continuing to fall, with overall usage down by 20% since April 2018.
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Facebook execs are worried that Zuck’s emails show he never took his FTC privacy obligations seriously
In 2012, Facebook settled an FTC privacy investigation by promising a host of privacy protections (that they never delivered on); now, the FTC is probing Facebook’s noncompliance and they’ve demanded that the company let them look at Zuck’s email, which prompted the company’s legal team to have a look therein, and they really didn’t like what they saw.
Continue reading “Facebook execs are worried that Zuck’s emails show he never took his FTC privacy obligations seriously”
68% of “ordinary Facebook investors” voted to fire Zuckerberg
Every year, activist investors try to get Mark Zuckerberg to resign for the good of the company, citing his incompetent handling of the company’s endless string of privacy scandals and his inability to steer the business towards a scandal-free, sustainable future: in 2018, 51% of the company’s “ordinary investors” (shareholders apart from Zuck, his board and his employees) voted to fire Zuckerberg; this year, the bloc calling for his resignation represented $3B in Facebook investments.
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Speech Police: vital, critical look at the drive to force Big Tech to control who may speak and what they may say
David Kaye (previously) has served as the UN Special Rapporteur on the promotion and protection of the right to freedom of opinion and expression since 2014 — a critical half-decade in the evolution of free speech both online and offline; in Speech Police: The Global Struggle to Govern the Internet a new, short book from Columbia Special Reports, Kaye provides a snapshot of the global state of play for expression, as governments, platforms, and activists act out of a mix of both noble and corrupt motives to control online discourse.
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What the FTC should do AFTER it fines Facebook $3-5B
Facebook is about to pay the largest privacy-related fine in US history: $3-5B (the company made $3.3B in Q1/2019).
The FTC’s fines are a nice start, but fines are just part of the cost of doing business. To change Facebook’s conduct, the FTC should impose structural changes on the company, and EFF’s Bennett Cyphers has some suggestions: ban third-party tracking; prohibit the combining of data from Whatsapp, Instagram and Facebook; and ban the company from targeting ads with information from data brokers.
That’s for starters.
Stop Third-Party Tracking
Facebook uses “Like” buttons, invisible Pixel conversion trackers, and ad code in mobile apps to track its users nearly any time they use the Internet—even when they’re off Facebook products. This program allows Facebook to build nauseatingly detailed profiles of users’—and non-users’—personal activity. Facebook’s unique ability to match third-party website activity to real-world identities also gives it a competitive advantage in both the social media and third-party ad markets. The FTC should order Facebook to stop linking data it collects outside of Facebook with user profiles inside the social network.
Don’t Merge WhatsApp, Instagram, and Facebook Data
Facebook has announced plans to build a unified chat platform so that users can send messages between WhatsApp, Messenger, and Instagram accounts seamlessly. Letting users of different services talk to each other is reasonable, and Facebook’s commitment to end-to-end encryption for the unified service is great (if it’s for real). But in order to link the services together, Facebook will likely need to merge account data from its disparate properties. This may help Facebook enrich its user profiles for ad targeting and make it harder for users to fully extricate their data from the Facebook empire should they decide to leave. Furthermore, there’s a risk that people with one set of expectations for a service like Instagram, which allows pseudonyms and does not require a phone number, will be blindsided when Facebook links their accounts to real identities. This could expose sensitive information about vulnerable people to friends, family, ex-partners, or law enforcement. In short, there are dozens of ways the great messenger union could go wrong.
Facebook promises that messaging “interoperability” will be opt-in. But corporations are fickle, and Facebook and other tech giants have repeatedly walked back privacy commitments they’ve made in the past. The FTC should make sure Facebook stays true to its word by ordering it not to merge user data from its different properties without express opt-in consent. Furthermore, if users do decide to opt-in to merging their Instagram or WhatsApp accounts with Facebook data, the FTC should make sure they reserve the right to opt back out.
Stop Data Broker-Powered Ad Targeting
Last March, Facebook shut down its “Partner Categories” program, in which it purchased data from data brokers like Acxiom and Oracle in order to boost its own ad-targeting system. But over a year later, advertisers are still using data broker-provided information to target users on Facebook, and both Facebook and data brokers are still raking in profit. That’s because Facebook allows data brokers to upload “custom audience data files”—lists of contact information, drawn from the brokers’ vast tranches of personal data—where they can charge advertisers to access those lists. As a result, though the interface has changed, data broker-powered targeting on Facebook is alive and well.
Data brokers are some of the shadiest actors in the digital marketplace. They make money by buying and selling detailed information about billions of people. And most of the people they profile don’t know they exist. The FTC should order Facebook to stop allowing data brokers to upload and share custom audiences with advertisers, and to explicitly disallow advertisers from using data broker-provided information on Facebook. This will make Facebook a safer, less creepy place for users, and it will put a serious dent in the dirty business of buying and selling private information.
Fines Aren’t Enough: Here’s How the FTC Can Make Facebook Better [Bennett Cyphers/EFF Deeplinks]