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Facebook sued for ‘losing control’ of users’ data

bbc.com

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Re: Facebook sued for ‘losing control’ of users’ data

#101

Post by prostoalex »

leothecool wrote: post #72
voxic11 wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Freely sharing your friends' data without their permission may be a GDPR violation. Absurd, how would an email provider or social network even work if you couldn't enter your friends contact information.

There is an exception for data that is required for the functioning of the service. You need your friends email address to use email, but do you really need their birthday or a sentiment analysis of their opinion of cheesecakes?

> but do you really need their birthday or a sentiment analysis of their opinion of cheesecakes

If you go back to the Wild West of the Facebook apps, shortly after platform launch there was an app for everything - apps for fancy birthday cards with birthday reminders, as well as polling apps telling you which one of your friends is the biggest cheesecake lover.

Every piece of data can be spun into being essential.

Re: Facebook sued for ‘losing control’ of users’ data

#102

Post by Ajedi32 »

dfxm12 wrote: post #54
Nextgrid wrote: post #3

I'm no Facebook fan but the reasons behind the lawsuit are bad and could set a bad precedent. Cambridge Analytica used the Facebook API to ask users to share data about them & their friends. Stupid users agreed to that. The argument here isn't that Facebook is playing fast and loose with tracking & user data (which would be a legitimate argument), it's that Facebook is allowing people to grant access to their data to…

Cambridge Analytica used the Facebook API to ask users to share data about them & their friends. Stupid users agreed to that. According to Facebook, this is not what happened and CA's collection of this data represented a breach in their platform policies [0]: In 2015, we learned that a psychology professor at the University of Cambridge named Dr. Aleksandr Kogan lied to us and violated our Platform Policies by passi…

From the link:

> The claim that this is a data breach is completely false. Aleksandr Kogan requested and gained access to information from users who chose to sign up to his app, and everyone involved gave their consent. People knowingly provided their information, no systems were infiltrated, and no passwords or sensitive pieces of information were stolen or hacked.

Users knowingly _agreed_ to share their data with Dr. Kogan. Dr. Kogan was contractually prohibited from passing that information on to third parties (Cambridge Analytica) but did so anyway and was banned as a result.

Re: Facebook sued for ‘losing control’ of users’ data

#103

Post by TheRealDunkirk »

Nextgrid wrote: post #3

I'm no Facebook fan but the reasons behind the lawsuit are bad and could set a bad precedent. Cambridge Analytica used the Facebook API to ask users to share data about them & their friends. Stupid users agreed to that. The argument here isn't that Facebook is playing fast and loose with tracking & user data (which would be a legitimate argument), it's that Facebook is allowing people to grant access to their data to…

> could set a bad precedent

You're absolutely right. Holding companies responsible for bad outcomes due to their their products and practices would be very bad for our corporatocracy. So don't worry. I'm quite sure we're not going to start trifling with such nonsense now.

Re: Facebook sued for ‘losing control’ of users’ data

#104

Post by Nextgrid »

JustSomeNobody wrote: post #81
Nextgrid wrote: post #3

I'm no Facebook fan but the reasons behind the lawsuit are bad and could set a bad precedent. Cambridge Analytica used the Facebook API to ask users to share data about them & their friends. Stupid users agreed to that. The argument here isn't that Facebook is playing fast and loose with tracking & user data (which would be a legitimate argument), it's that Facebook is allowing people to grant access to their data to…

> Stupid users agreed to that. Can we not do this, please? People are being manipulated like never before. Almost anyone is susceptible.

There's plenty of manipulation out there (including by Facebook themselves), but I wouldn't consider an OAuth consent prompt as manipulation?

Cambridge Analytica may have lied about their intentions, but when requesting access, the Facebook consent prompt is very clear about what data would be shared. Why should Facebook be on the hook for CA's lies?

Re: Facebook sued for ‘losing control’ of users’ data

#106

Post by shanemlk »

jagged-chisel wrote: post #100
shanemlk wrote: post #98

Why do my comments keep getting down voted? How much more obvious can it be that zuckerburg has caused more damage to the Earth than good? WHY DO I HAVE TO DEFEND MYSELF FOR SUCH A CLEARLY OBVIOUS OPINION? You are "HACKERS". Start acting like it.

Probably because the language you chose to use is less than civil.

Touché, valid point. But someone's gotta break the Matrix once in a while... at the end of the day, this is just a text based website, and I'm hammering keys. It wasn't like I was walking down the street yelling obscenities. It's OK, to be aggressive sometimes. Everything in moderation.

Re: Facebook sued for ‘losing control’ of users’ data

#107

Post by Ajedi32 »

dtech wrote: post #68
stickfigure wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Why does Facebook allow people to share the data of others who didn't agree to this? I have names, email addresses, phone numbers, birthdates, email contents, and more for most of my friends. There's no centralized arbiter of this information; I have the ability to share this data in any way I choose. And I do! I switch email providers, install apps on my phone, use calendaring systems, tell our friends where to me…

> I don't need your consent for any of it, because even though the information may be about you, we understand that it's "my" data. You do need content though, if I provide my email in a social setting I implicitly give consent to birthday parties etc. I didn't consent to you selling my email as part of a bundle. If people found out you were providing data to random people at least a stern talking to would happen. Un…

So if I give you my phone number and you store it in Google Contacts, and I later decide I don't want you to have my phone number anymore, under GDPR can I request that Google delete my number from your contacts? After all, I never consented to you sharing my phone number with Google.

Re: Facebook sued for ‘losing control’ of users’ data

#108

Post by bzb6 »

at-fates-hands wrote: post #45
bzb6 wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There’s no thousand page EULA. Just a screen that says “do you want to allow this app to access your profile data and your friend list” and they clicked yes.

Should Cambridge Analytica then be held accountable for being dubious in what users were giving access to and what they would do with that data? Do you think if they knew the full scope of Cambridge Analytica's work they would've allowed them to access the data?

If I tell you to go on Facebook and take screenshots of your friends’ profiles and send them to me and then I do dubious things using that information, whose fault is it? I’d split it between you and me. Facebook is not at fault at all.

Re: Facebook sued for ‘losing control’ of users’ data

#109

Post by Nextgrid »

adverbly wrote: post #84
bzb6 wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If your friend has view access to your profile, why shouldn’t he be able to extract that information via an API as well?

I grant API access to my friend. That is a direct relationship. I don't grant API access to people that my friend grants API access to. If one grant allowed for another grant, by that logic you could chain all the way down to any connected node which is clearly not a desirable model. Data brokers are trying to make it seem like me adding a friend is somehow not a grant so that they can "plus one" on their reach. But…

API access or not is just a technicality. You grant your friend access to this data. Even if API access was restricted, malicious parties would just get your friend to install malware or give out their Facebook credentials directly (thus bypassing the API access restriction).

Either you trust your friend with that data or you don't. Anything else is just playing a game of whack-a-mole which may just give people a false sense of security.

Re: Facebook sued for ‘losing control’ of users’ data

#110

Post by Nextgrid »

PeterisP wrote: post #42
bzb6 wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If your friend has view access to your profile, why shouldn’t he be able to extract that information via an API as well?

Someone who has view access to my profile may view my data, and they might also extract that information with API - however, they do not have any right to give permission on my behalf to someone else (e.g. Cambridge Analytica), that would require a power of attorney or something like that. My friend might technically send that information to Cambridge Analytica, but my friend can't give them permission to use it, CA…

> My friend might technically send that information to Cambridge Analytica, but my friend can't give them permission to use it, CA would be required to acknowledge that they don't have the legal permission to use that data and discard it.

It's pretty well accepted that Cambridge Analytica acted unethically, and potentially even unlawfully.

> My friend can tell Facebook "I permit you to give that information to Cambridge Analytica" but Facebook is not allowed to act based on that "permission" since it's not something my friend can permit.

This seems like an unnecessary technicality - if CA wasn't allowed to access your data directly they would just proxy it through the original user's device via an app or something. The end result would be the same.

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