Showing 8 results for:
facebook-data-breach
Popular topics
All results
The 2020 presidential election is right around the corner and with it come questions around social media’s potential impact on the outcome. Social media’s potential to spread misinformation has been in the news a lot over the past few years and its evolved from something most people saw as a place to connect with friends to a machine that disrupts key parts of our democracy. People are able to curate their timelines and newsfeeds, but algorithms hold the real power, working behind the scenes to regulate the content you see, from targeted ads to the publications that are presented to you. With social media essentially shaping the information you get, many people are concerned about the spread of misinformation. After all, not everything that you read on the internet is true, and social media platforms themselves have been guilty of spreading misinformation or otherwise allowing election interference to occur. Perhaps the most infamous case of election interference spurred by social...
Over the past year, Facebook has made it clear that the company wants to improve its reputation amongst the public. Since pivoting to privacy, the company has poured money into global advertising to help offset some of the consequences from its security mishaps, such as the infamous 2018 Cambridge Analaytica scandal . Part of Facebook’s push to privacy included an increased focus on private groups and messaging . That can be seen with some of the ads Facebook is developing, like ones with the campaign, “More Together.” The ad is intended to make people think about the meaningful exchanges Facebook allows them to have, but there’s a downside to the company’s new focus on groups. Facebook has always struggled with content moderation. By encouraging users to take their Facebook experience into closed, private forums — such as groups or messaging — the company has essentially skirted a lot of its responsibility as a platform. Recently, reports found that Border Patrol officers were in a...
Facebook is no stranger to privacy scandals, much to the frustration of many users. Now, investment firms have even begun side eyeing the social media giant. Investment firm S&P Dow Jones Indices has decided to remove Facebook from its S&P 500 ESG Index, Business Insider reported . Essentially, the index tracks how socially responsible companies are. It scores them based on environmental, social, and corporate governance rankings. Reid Steadman, global head of ESG at S&P, explained Facebook’s removal in a blog post : “The specific issues resulting in these scores had to do with various privacy concerns, including a lack of transparency as to why Facebook collects and shares certain user information. These events have created uncertainty about Facebook’s diligence regarding privacy protection, and the effectiveness of the company risk management processes and how the company enforces them. These issues caused the company to lag behind its peers in terms of the ESG performance.”...
Last year, the European Union passed some of the toughest privacy and data laws with its General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) . Since then, the GDPR has served as inspiration for California’s groundbreaking Consumer Privacy Act and Washington State’s privacy act . When it comes to privacy laws, the United States isn’t that great. Poor federal regulations mean it’s generally up to states to protect consumers, but that’s not enough. In a recent blog post , Microsoft’s corporate vice president and deputy general counsel, Julie Brill, reflected on what a privacy law could look like in the United States. “The driving force behind the global movement to modernize privacy laws is the new understanding people have of their right to privacy as technology changes how people create and share information,” Brill wrote. “Around the world, there is a growing expectation that everyone should benefit from digital technology without losing control of their personal information.” Growing...
Facebook seems to have a new privacy violation every month. From storing millions of passwords in plain text to the infamous Cambridge Analytica scandal , Facebook keeps on messing up. In February, the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) began negotiating a multi-billion dollar fine with Facebook — mainly due to Cambridge Analytica and the lack of privacy practices following it. The FTC focused on whether Facebook had violated a 2011 agreement to improve privacy on the platform. Now, it seems that the FTC fine will become a reality. Facebook has set aside $3 billion in anticipation, as revealed by the company’s first-quarter earnings for 2019. Within the report, Facebook wrote that it set aside the money because the company “reasonably estimated a probable loss.” The company directly identified the FTC’s inquiry into its data practices as the reasoning, adding, “We estimate that the range of loss in this matter is $3.0 billion to $5.0 billion. The matter remains unresolved, and there can...
Facebook’s struggles with privacy are well known, from the Cambridge Analytica scandal to the company storing passwords in plaintext . Every time, Facebook says it’ll do better, but it seems it still hasn’t done enough. Recently, researchers from security firm UpGuard found that third-party Facebook app developers left hundreds of millions of user records on publicly visible cloud servers. Most of the data came from Cultura Colective, a media company based in Mexico. They were responsible for a 146 gigabyte dataset that contained 540 million records detailing comments, likes, reactions, account names, FB IDs, and more. UpGuard reported they tried contacting Cultura Colective on January 10th, 2019 and again on the 14th to no response. In addition, researchers found data from an app titled “At the Pool”. It contained personal information along with 22,000 passwords. Although researchers assumed those passwords were for the app itself, they noted it put users at risk if they reused the...
Facebook isn’t exactly well known for having the best security practices and now, another blunder has surfaced. On Thursday, a report from Krebs on Security revealed the company had stored hundreds of millions of users’ passwords for Facebook, Facebook Lite, and Instagram in plain text, making user passwords accessible to thousands of Facebook employees. Usually, passwords are encrypted when they’re stored through a process called hashing , but Facebook had a “series of security failures” that left people’s password information wide open, according to the Krebs report. Pedro Canahuati, Facebook’sVP of Engineering, Security, and Privacy, confirmed the breach in a blog titled “Keeping Passwords Secure”, writing, “As part of a routine security review in January, we found that some user passwords were being stored in a readable format within our internal data storage systems.” This may not seem like a big deal, because the company said there’s no sign that the passwords were visible to...
Facebook is facing government consequences in both the United States and the United Kingdom for it’s privacy mishaps. In early 2018, it was revealed that Facebook exposed data on up to 87 million users to a researcher at Cambridge Analytica. The data was harvested through a quiz the researcher developed. Data was collected not only from people who took the quiz, but a loophole in the Facebook API allowed it to collect data from Facebook friends of the quiz takers, too. Since then, Facebook has been under a lot of scrutiny — from both its users and governments around the world. The Digital, Culture, Media and Sport committee of the UK Parliament recently published a report following its 18-month long investigation of Facebook. “Facebook intentionally and knowingly violated both data privacy and anti-competition laws,” UK lawmakers wrote in their report calling for a code of ethics for tech companies overseen by an independent regulator. Under the code, social media companies, like...