Facebook Ignores Privacy Settings

If you're using the internet, you've given away all rights to privacy.

"Steve Satterfield, Facebook’s director of privacy and public policy, said the sharing deals did not violate privacy rules because the partners functioned as extensions of the social network." (emphasis added)

In other words, it's all internet.

In March 2018 it was reported that Cambridge Analytica, a political consulting firm, used Facebook data to build tools for President Trump’s 2016 campaign. Facebook said then that it had instituted stricter privacy protections. Mark Zuckerberg, the chief executive, told lawmakers in April that people “have complete control” over everything they share on Facebook.

However,

• Facebook continued sharing for Pandora and other companies even after an F.T.C. agreement led to an official change in policy.

• Facebook allowed Microsoft’s Bing search engine to see the names of all Facebook users’ friends without consent, and gave Netflix and Spotify the ability to read Facebook users’ private messages.

• The Russian company Yandex, which has been accused of giving information to the Kremlin, had access to Facebook data as recently as last year.

• Facebook used contact lists from its partners, including Amazon, Yahoo and Huawei, to analyze relationships and suggest more connections.

• Facebook allowed Apple to hide all signs that it was asking for data. Apple had access to the contact numbers and calendar entries of people who had changed their account settings to disable all sharing.

• Facebook permitted Amazon to obtain users’ names and contact information through their friends, and it let Yahoo view streams of friends’ posts as recently as this summer.

• Sony, Microsoft, Amazon and others could obtain users’ email addresses through their friends, in spite of the user's privacy settings.

Europe has stricter regulation of social media companies. The United States has no general consumer privacy law, leaving tech companies free to monetize most kinds of personal information as long as they don’t mislead their users. The F.T.C. currently has consent agreements with Facebook, Google, and Twitter from alleged privacy violations.

Facebook’s agreement comes from the company’s early data sharing in 2009, when it made some information from its 400 million users accessible to all of the internet. It shared information that included users’ locations and religious and political beliefs to help personalize sites like Bing.

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Source: Gabriel J.X. Dance, Michael LaForgia, and Nicholas Confessore, "As Facebook Raised a Privacy Wall, It Carved an Opening for Tech Giants," New York Times, December 19, 2018