British Government Report Slams Facebook as "Digital Gangsters"

Facebook deliberately broke privacy and competition law and should urgently be subject to statutory regulation, according to a devastating parliamentary report denouncing the company and its executives as “digital gangsters”.
The final report of the Digital, Culture, Media and Sport select committee’s 18-month investigation into disinformation and fake news accused Facebook of purposefully obstructing its inquiry and failing to tackle attempts by Russia to manipulate elections.
“Democracy is at risk from the malicious and relentless targeting of citizens with disinformation and personalised ‘dark adverts’ from unidentifiable sources, delivered through the major social media platforms we use every day,” warned the committee’s chairman, Damian Collins.
The report:

• Accuses Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook’s co-founder and chief executive, of contempt for parliament in refusing three separate demands for him to give evidence, instead sending junior employees unable to answer the committee’s questions.
• Warns British electoral law is unfit for purpose and vulnerable to interference by hostile foreign actors, including agents of the Russian government attempting to discredit democracy.
• Calls on the British government to establish an independent investigation into “foreign influence, disinformation, funding, voter manipulation and the sharing of data” in the 2014 Scottish independence referendum, the 2016 EU referendum and the 2017 general election.
  
  Read the rest here.

Facebook Allowed Netflix, Other Buisneses to See Your Private Messages

For years, Facebook gave some of the world’s largest technology companies more intrusive access to users’ personal data than it has disclosed, effectively exempting those business partners from its usual privacy rules, according to internal records and interviews.

The special arrangements are detailed in hundreds of pages of Facebook documents obtained by The New York Times. The records, generated in 2017 by the company’s internal system for tracking partnerships, provide the most complete picture yet of the social network’s data-sharing practices. They also underscore how personal data has become the most prized commodity of the digital age, traded on a vast scale by some of the most powerful companies in Silicon Valley and beyond.

The exchange was intended to benefit everyone. Pushing for explosive growth, Facebook got more users, lifting its advertising revenue. Partner companies acquired features to make their products more attractive. Facebook users connected with friends across different devices and websites. But Facebook also assumed extraordinary power over the personal information of its 2.2 billion users — control it has wielded with little transparency or outside oversight.

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.

Read the rest here.

Facebook

Long time readers of this blog will know that the only form of social media that I use, is this blog. That means I am not, and have never been on Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter etc. I have always viewed them as an engraved invitation to invasion of privacy and I consider Facebook in particular to be quite sinister. Recent events have certainly done nothing to alter that view.

For those who might want to leave Facebook, the process is actually not easy. However there are a number of tutorial videos that are available on YouTube.

A word of caution... I understand that some people store a lot of stuff on their Facebook account, some of which may be important or hold sentimental value etc. You should download a copy of all your data from Facebook before deleting your account. Once your account is actually deleted, as opposed to deactivated, everything that was on it will be gone and you won't be able to get it back. Also be aware that Facebook changed the procedures for account deletion in late 2017, so you will want to use a recent tutorial.

Good luck.