Don't use apps. It's a simple as that. 95% of the time they are not worth the incredible privacy invasion they impose on users.
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Meta accessed women's health data from Flo app without consent, says court
111–120 of 236 posts
Re: Meta accessed women's health data from Flo app without consent, says court
#112Why would an app that tracks menstrual cycles need to integrate with the Facebook SDK?? Pure insanity.
Why would an app that tracks menstrual cycles need to connect to the Internet at all? TFA mentions asking about quite a few other personal things as well. Is the app trying to do more than just tracking? If they're involved in any kind of diagnosis then I imagine there are further legal liability issues....
Re: Meta accessed women's health data from Flo app without consent, says court
#113Everybody misses the key information here - it’s a Belarusian app. CEO and CTO are Belarusian (probably there are more C-level people who are Belarusian or Russian). Not only are users giving up their private information but they are doing so to the malevolent (by definition) regimes. When the Western app says they don’t sell or give out private information, you can be suspicious but still somewhat trustful. When a d…
I would encourage you to read about the Edward Snowden guy and the PRISM program on wikipedia and most recent attempts of EU to ban the encryption. Also, here is what Pavel Durov mentioned recently in interview to Tucker Carlson > In the US you have a process that allows the government to actually force any engineer in any tech company to implement a backdoor and not tell anyone about it with using this process calle…
You are right. I still think it’s better if only our guys have this information than both, our guys and their guys. At least Western companies have the possibility to get regulated if political winds change.
Re: Meta accessed women's health data from Flo app without consent, says court
#114As much as I don't like facebook as a company, I think the jury reached the wrong decision here. If you read the complaint[1], "eavesdropped on and/or recorded their conversations by using an electronic device" basically amounted to "flo using facebook's sdk and sending custom events to it" (page 12, point 49). I agree that flo should be raked over the coals for sending this information to facebook in the first place…
Flo shouldn't have sent those data to FB. That's true. Which is why they settled. But FB, having received this info proceeded to use it and mix it with other signals it gets. Which is what the complaint against FB alleged.
I wish there was information about who at Facebook received this information and “used” it. I suspect it was mixed in with 9 million other sources of information and no human at Facebook was even aware it was there.
Re: Meta accessed women's health data from Flo app without consent, says court
#115As much as I don't like facebook as a company, I think the jury reached the wrong decision here. If you read the complaint[1], "eavesdropped on and/or recorded their conversations by using an electronic device" basically amounted to "flo using facebook's sdk and sending custom events to it" (page 12, point 49). I agree that flo should be raked over the coals for sending this information to facebook in the first place…
I would say you have a responsibility to ensure you are getting legal data. you don't buy stolen things. That is meta has a reponsibility to ensure that they are not partnering with crooks. Flo gets the largest blame but meta needs to show they did their part to ensure this didn't happen. (I would not call terms of use enough unless they can show they make you understand it)
>Flo gets the largest blame but meta needs to show they did their part to ensure this didn't happen. (I would not call terms of use enough unless they can show they make you understand it)
Court documents says that they blocked access as soon as they were aware of it. They also "built out its systems to detect and filter out “potentially health-related terms.”". Are you expecting more, like some sort of KYC/audit regime before you could get any API key? Isn't that the exact sort of stuff people were railing against, because indie/OSS developers were being hassled by the play store to undergo expensive audits to get access to sensitive permissions?
Re: Meta accessed women's health data from Flo app without consent, says court
#116This is really disappointing. I used to have a fertility tracking app on the iOS App Store, zero data sharing, all local thus private. But, people don’t want to pay $1 for an app, and I can’t afford the marketing drive that an investor-backed company such as this has… and so we end up with situations like this. Pity :(
Stories like this one can be the basis for effective marketing. We need to normalize paying $1 (or more, where warranted) for apps that provide value in the form of not doing the things that allow the $0 ones to be $0.
Re: Meta accessed women's health data from Flo app without consent, says court
#117As much as I don't like facebook as a company, I think the jury reached the wrong decision here. If you read the complaint[1], "eavesdropped on and/or recorded their conversations by using an electronic device" basically amounted to "flo using facebook's sdk and sending custom events to it" (page 12, point 49). I agree that flo should be raked over the coals for sending this information to facebook in the first place…
That's only the first part of the story, though.
Facebook isn't guilty because Flo sent medical data through their SDK. If they were just storing it or operating on it for Flo, then the case probably would have ended differently.
Facebook is guilty because they turned around and used the medical data themselves to advertise without checking if it was legal to do so. They knew, or should have known, that they needed to check if it was legal to use it, but they didn't, so they were found guilty.
Re: Meta accessed women's health data from Flo app without consent, says court
#118As much as I don't like facebook as a company, I think the jury reached the wrong decision here. If you read the complaint[1], "eavesdropped on and/or recorded their conversations by using an electronic device" basically amounted to "flo using facebook's sdk and sending custom events to it" (page 12, point 49). I agree that flo should be raked over the coals for sending this information to facebook in the first place…
Suing Facebook instead of Flo makes perfect sense, because Facebook has much more money. Plus juries are more likely to hate FB than a random menstruation company.
They sued both.
Re: Meta accessed women's health data from Flo app without consent, says court
#119Earlier quoted context omitted.
Flo shouldn't have sent those data to FB. That's true. Which is why they settled. But FB, having received this info proceeded to use it and mix it with other signals it gets. Which is what the complaint against FB alleged.
I wish there was information about who at Facebook received this information and “used” it. I suspect it was mixed in with 9 million other sources of information and no human at Facebook was even aware it was there.
So they shouldn’t be punished because they were negligent? Is that your argument?
Re: Meta accessed women's health data from Flo app without consent, says court
#120Earlier quoted context omitted.
> The app people were sending user data to meta with no restrictions on its use And then meta accessed it. So unless you put restrictions on data, meta is going to access it. Don't you think it should be the other way around? Meta to ask for permission? Then we wouldn't have this sort of thing.
Here's the restriction: don't send it to fb in the first place!
here's another one: fb shouldn't use every piece of data they can collect.