Key points from Facebook-Zuckerberg hearings

WASHINGTON, United States — Facebook chief Mark Zuckerberg testified for nearly 10 hours over two days on Facebook's privacy and data protection issues before committees of the Senate and House on Tuesday and Wednesday (Wednesday and Thursday, Manila time).

Here are key points:

Protecting the platform

"It's clear now we didn't do enough," Zuckerberg said on the protection of private user data and to prevent the hijacking of data on millions by Cambridge Analytica.

Zuckerberg said Facebook was built as "an idealistic and optimistic company" to help people connect but failed "to prevent these tools from being used for harm... that goes for fake news, for foreign interference in elections, and hate speech, as well as developers and data privacy."


He said that by the end of the year Facebook would have 20,000 people working on security and content review and would also step up use of artificial intelligence to weed out fake accounts and inappropriate content.

Regulation

Zuckerberg said regulation of social media companies is inevitable, but warned that rules could also hamper the industry's growth.

"The internet is growing in importance around the world in people's lives, and I think that it is inevitable that there will need to be some regulation," he told lawmakers.

"But I think you have to be careful about putting regulation in place. A lot of times regulations put in place rules that a company that is larger, that has resources like ours, can easily comply with, but that might be more difficult for a smaller startup company."

Zuckerberg said the EU's General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) to come into effect on May 25 was more stringent than what was currently in place at Facebook and suggested it could serve as a rough model for US rules in the future.

Facebook is implementing the GDPR standards for European users next month, and some of its rules will be extended to US and other users later, he confirmed.

"The GDPR requires us to do a few more things and we are going to extend that to the world," he said.

Facebook model

Zuckerberg maintained that Facebook users deserve protection of private data but appeared to argue that its controls make it possible to determine how information is shared.

He claimed that "there's a very common misperception... that we sell data to advertisers," adding that "we do not sell data to advertisers. We don't sell data to anyone."

But he maintained that advertising enables Facebookto offer a free service and that targeted ads based on user categories were more acceptable to users, even if they could opt out.

Zuckerberg also said the company believed in an ad-supported business model, but appeared to leave open the possibility of a paid version.

"There will always be a version of Facebook that is free," Zuckerberg told the hearing.

Russian manipulation

The 33-year-old CEO said Facebook was in a constant struggle to guard against Russian manipulation of the Facebook platform to influence elections in the US and elsewhere.

"There are people in Russia whose job it is to try to exploit our systems and other internet systems and other systems as well," he said.

"So this is an arms race. They're going to keep getting better and we need to invest in getting better at this too."

Zuckerberg has previously acknowledged the social network failed to do enough to prevent the spread of disinformation during the last US presidential race.

"One of my greatest regrets in running the company is that we were slow in identifying the Russian information operations in 2016," he said.

"We expected them to do a number of more traditional cyber attacks, which we did identify and notify the campaigns that they were trying to hack into them. But we were slow at identifying the type of — of new information operations."

He added that Facebook is cooperating with the special counsel investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election.

"Our work with the special counsel is confidential. I want to make sure in an open session I don't reveal something that's confidential," he said.

source: philstar.com

Facebook cuts ties to data brokers in blow to targeted ads

Facebook Inc said on Wednesday it would end its partnerships with several large data brokers who help advertisers target people on the social network, a step that follows a scandal over how Facebook handles personal information.

The world’s largest social media company is under pressure to improve its handling of data after disclosing that information about 50 million Facebook users wrongly ended up in the hands of political consultancy Cambridge Analytica.

Facebook adjusted the privacy settings on its service on Wednesday, giving users control over their personal information in fewer taps.

Facebook has for years given advertisers the option of targeting their ads based on data collected by companies such as Acxiom Corp and Experian PLC.

The tool has been widely used among certain categories of advertisers – such as automakers, luxury goods producers and consumer packaged goods companies – who do not sell directly to consumers and have relatively little information about who their customers are, according to Facebook.


“While this is common industry practice, we believe this step, winding down over the next six months, will help improve people’s privacy on Facebook,” Graham Mudd, a Facebook product marketing director, said in a statement.

Shares in Acxiom traded down more than 10 percent to $25 after Facebook’s announcement after the bell. Shares in other data brokers were largely unchanged.

Acxiom said late on Wednesday it did not expect this change to impact its revenue or earnings for the year ending in March. The company currently expects revenue in the range of $910 million to $915 million in the 2018 fiscal year.

However, for the 2019 fiscal year, Acxiom expects total revenue and profitability to be negatively impacted by as much as $25 million.

Facebook declined to comment on how the change could affect its ad revenue.

Advertisers would still be able to use third-party data services to measure how well their ads performed by examining purchasing data, Facebook said.

Facebook’s website lists nine third-party data providers that it has worked with, including Acxiom, Experian, Oracle Data Cloud, TransUnion and WPP PLC.

Other companies, besides Acxiom, were not available for comment.

Facebook on Wednesday also put all its privacy settings on one page and made it easier to stop third-party apps from using personal information. Privacy settings had previously been spread over at least 20 screens, Facebook said.

Facebook said in a blog post it had been working on the updates for some time but sped things up to appease users’ anger over how the company uses data and as lawmakers around the globe call for regulation.

Facebook’s shares closed up 0.5 percent at $153.03 on Wednesday. They are still down more than 17 percent since March 16, when Facebook first acknowledged that user data had been improperly channeled in 2014 via a third-party app to Cambridge Analytica, which was later hired by Donald Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign.

The data leak has raised investor concerns that any failure by big tech companies to protect privacy could deter advertisers, who are Facebook’s lifeblood, and lead to tougher regulation.

SCRUTINY FROM LAWMAKERS

Facebook Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg has repeatedly apologized for the mistakes the company made and has promised to crack down on abuse of the Facebook platform and restrict developers’ access to user information.
There is a new Facebook page – called Access Your Information – where users can see what they have shared and manage it.

“The biggest difference is ease of access in settings, which fulfills Mark Zuckerberg’s promise to make the privacy process and permissions more transparent to users,” Wedbush analyst Michael Pachter said.

It was uncertain whether the changes will satisfy lawmakers.

They were announced ahead of a stringent European Union data law which comes into force in May. It requires companies to give people a “right to portability” – to take their data with them – and imposes fines of up to 4 percent of global revenue for companies breaking the law.

Lawmakers in the United States and Britain are still clamoring for Zuckerberg himself to explain how users’ data ended up in the hands of Cambridge Analytica.

He plans to testify before Congress, a source briefed on the matter said on Tuesday. Facebook has said it has received invitations to testify and that it is talking to legislators.

Zuckerberg and the CEOs of Alphabet Inc and Twitter Inc have been invited to testify at an April 10 hearing on data privacy. The US House Energy and Commerce Committee and US Senate Commerce Committee have also asked Zuckerberg to appear at a hearing.

The US Federal Trade Commission has opened an investigation into Facebook, and attorneys representing 37 states are also pressing Zuckerberg to explain what happened.

source: interaksyon.com

Whistleblower questions Brexit result, says campaigners broke election law

LONDON – A whistleblower at the heart of a Facebook data scandal on Monday questioned the result of Britain’s 2016 Brexit referendum as his lawyers presented evidence that they said showed the main campaign for leaving the EU had broken the law.

With just a year until Britain is due to leave the European Union, two whistleblowers – one from the British political consultancy Cambridge Analytica and one from the Vote Leave group – have alleged that Brexit campaigners funded their campaign illegally.

By doing so, they have pulled Brexit into a scandal that has forced Mark Zuckerberg to apologize for how Facebook handled users’ data, and raised questions about how Donald Trump’s 2016 campaign employed data.

Vote Leave officials on Monday denied breaking election rules and said they were facing an attempt to undermine Brexit by smearing their reputations.

The whistleblowers’ law firm, London-based Bindmans, released 53 pages of selected evidence on Monday.


In a legal opinion, Bindmans said there was a prima facie case that Vote Leave broke election spending limits by donating to an allied group known as BeLeave, with which it was working closely.

“Can we be confident in the result of the referendum?” said whistleblower Christopher Wylie, formerly of Cambridge Analytica. “This is not refighting the referendum. This is about the integrity of the democratic process.”

“If this country is on the path of an irreversible decision, we really should be confident that the basis of that decision came from a free and fair vote – and what this evidence does is it calls into question whether it was free and fair.”

Reuters was unable to verify the allegations made against Vote Leave. Matthew Elliott, its former CEO, said the allegations were wrong.

“Vote Leave did not break the law,” Elliott told Reuters. “Voters can be confident this was a free and fair referendum.”

Elliott said the Electoral Commission had twice looked into Vote Leave’s relationship with BeLeave and had given it a clean bill of health both times. He said he was confident that the third investigation would produce the same result.

“The basis of all this is an attempt by people on the ‘Remain’ campaign to call into doubt the result of the EU referendum,” Elliott said.

source: interaksyon.com

Facebook made mistakes on user data — Zuckerberg

SAN FRANCISCO, CALIFORNIA — Facebook Inc Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg said on Wednesday that his company made mistakes in how it handled data belonging to 50 million of its users and promised tougher steps to restrict developers’ access to such information.

The world’s largest social media network is facing growing government scrutiny in Europe and the United States about a whistleblower’s allegations that London-based political consultancy Cambridge Analytica improperly accessed user information to build profiles on American voters which were later used to help elect U.S. President Donald Trump in 2016.

Zuckerberg, in his first public comments since the scandal erupted at the weekend, said in a post on Facebook that the company “made mistakes, there’s more to do, and we need to step up and do it.” (bit.ly/2DHAlUJ)

He did not elaborate on what the mistakes were, but he said the social network plans to conduct an investigation of apps on its platform, restrict developer access to data, and give members a tool that lets them more easily disable access to their Facebook data.

His plans did not represent a big reduction of advertisers’ ability to use Facebook data, which is the company’s lifeblood.


Zuckerberg later told CNN, “This was a major breach of trust. I’m really sorry this happened. We have a basic responsibility to protect people’s data.”

He told CNN that Facebook was committed to stopping interference in the U.S. midterm election in November and elections in India and Brazil.

Zuckerberg said he was open to additional government regulation and happy to testify before the U.S. Congress if he was the right person.

“I’m not sure we shouldn’t be regulated,” he said. “I actually think the question is more what is the right regulation rather than yes or no, should it be regulated? … People should know who is buying the ads that they see on Facebook.”

Facebook shares pared gains on Wednesday after Zuckerberg’s post, closing up 0.7 percent. The company has lost more than $45 billion of its stock market value over the past three days on investor fears that any failure by big tech firms to protect personal data could deter advertisers and users and invite tougher regulation.

Facebook representatives including Deputy Chief Privacy Officer Rob Sherman met U.S. congressional staff for nearly two hours on Wednesday and planned to continue meetings on Capitol Hill on Thursday. Facebook was unable to answer many questions, two aides who attended the briefing said.

Zuckerberg told the website Recode that fixes to protect users’ data would cost “many millions of dollars.”

The whistleblower who launched the scandal, Christopher Wylie, formerly of Cambridge Analytica, said in a tweet that he had accepted invitations to testify before U.S. and UK lawmakers.

Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg speaks during the Alumni Exercises following the 366th Commencement Exercises at Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts, U.S., May 25, 2017. REUTERS/Brian Snyder
The German government said Facebook must explain whether the personal data of the country’s 30 million users were protected from unlawful use by third parties, according to a report in the Funke group of German regional newspapers.

‘Scapegoat’

On Tuesday, the board of Cambridge Analytica suspended its Chief Executive Alexander Nix, who was caught in a secret recording boasting that his company played a decisive role in Trump’s victory.

But the academic who provided the data disputed that on Wednesday.

“I think what Cambridge Analytica has tried to sell is magic, and they’ve made claims that this is incredibly accurate and it tells you everything there is to tell about you. But I think the reality is it’s not that,” psychologist Aleksandr Kogan, an academic at Cambridge University, told the BBC in an interview broadcast on Wednesday.

Kogan, who gathered the data by running a survey app on Facebook, also said that he was being made a scapegoat by Facebook and Cambridge Analytica. Both companies have blamed Kogan for alleged data misuse.

Only 300,000 Facebook users responded to Kogan’s quiz, but that gave the researcher access to those people’s Facebook friends as well, who had not agreed to share information, producing details on 50 million users.

Facebook has said it subsequently made changes that prevent people from sharing data about friends, and maintains that no data breach occurred because the original users gave permission. Critics say that it essentially was a breach because data of unsuspecting friends was taken.

source: interaksyon.com

Trump consultants harvested data from 50 million Facebook users: reports

Data analytics firm Cambridge Analytica harvested private information from more than 50 million Facebook users in developing techniques to support President Donald Trump’s 2016 election campaign, the New York Times and London’s Observer reported on Saturday.

The newspapers, which cited former Cambridge Analytica employees, associates and documents, said the data breach was one of the largest in the history of Facebook Inc.

Facebook on Friday said it was suspending Cambridge Analytica after finding data privacy policies had been violated.

The Observer said Cambridge Analytica used the data, taken without authorization in early 2014, to build a software program to predict and influence choices at the ballot box.

The paper quoted Cambridge Analytica whistleblower Christopher Wylie, who worked with an academic at Cambridge University to obtain the data, as saying the system could profile individual voters to target them with personalized political advertisements.


The more than 50 million profiles represented around a third of active North American Facebook users, and nearly a quarter of potential US voters, at the time, the paper said.

“We exploited Facebook to harvest millions of people’s profiles. And built models to exploit what we knew about them and target their inner demons. That was the basis that the entire company was built on,” the Observer quoted Wylie as saying.

The New York Times said interviews with a half-dozen former Cambridge Analytica employees and contractors, and a review of the firm’s emails and documents, revealed it not only relied on the private Facebook data but still possesses most or all of it.

The Observer said the data was collected through an app called thisisyourdigitallife, built by academic Aleksandr Kogan, separately from his work at Cambridge University.

Through Kogan’s company Global Science Research (GSR), in collaboration with Cambridge Analytica, hundreds of thousands of users were paid to take a personality test and agreed to have their data collected for academic use, the Observer said.

However, the app also collected the information of the test-takers’ Facebook friends, leading to the accumulation of a data pool tens of millions-strong, the paper said. It said Facebook’s “platform policy” allowed only collection of friends data to improve user experience in the app and barred it from being sold on or used for advertising.

Facebook said on Friday it had suspended Cambridge Analytica and its parent group Strategic Communication Laboratories (SCL) after receiving reports they did not delete information about Facebook users that had been inappropriately shared.

A spokesman for Cambridge Analytica said GSR “was contractually committed by us to only obtain data in accordance with the UK Data Protection Act and to seek the informed consent of each respondent.”

“When it subsequently became clear that the data had not been obtained by GSR in line with Facebook’s terms of service, Cambridge Analytica deleted all data received from GSR,” he said.

“We worked with Facebook over this period to ensure that they were satisfied that we had not knowingly breached any of Facebook’s terms of service and also provided a signed statement to confirm that all Facebook data and their derivatives had been deleted,” the spokesman said.

He added that “no data from GSR was used by Cambridge Analytica as part of the services it provided to the Donald Trump 2016 presidential campaign.”

The Trump campaign did not respond to a request for comment. Facebook did not mention the Trump campaign or any other campaigns in its statement, which was attributed to the social network’s deputy general counsel, Paul Grewal.

“We will take legal action if necessary to hold them responsible and accountable for any unlawful behavior,” Facebook said, adding that it was continuing to investigate the claims.

In a Twitter post, Facebook’s Chief Security Officer Alex Stamos called the news reports “important and powerful,” but said it was “incorrect to call this a ‘breach’ under any reasonable definition of the term.”

“We can condemn this behavior while being accurate in our description of it,” he said.

‘MORE EVIDENCE’

On its website, Cambridge Analytica says it “provided the Donald J. Trump for President campaign with the expertise and insights that helped win the White House.”
Brad Parscale, who ran Trump’s digital ad operation in 2016 and is his 2020 re-election campaign manager, declined to comment on Friday.

In past interviews with Reuters, Parscale has said Cambridge Analytica played a minor role as a contractor in the 2016 campaign, and that the campaign used voter data from a Republican-affiliated organization rather than Cambridge Analytica.

Senator Mark Warner, the top Democrat on the US Senate Intelligence Committee, said the case was “more evidence that the online political advertising market is essentially the Wild West” and showed the need for Congress to pass legislation to bring transparency and accountability to online political advertisements.

The suspension means Cambridge Analytica and SCL cannot buy ads on the world’s largest social media network or administer pages belonging to clients, Andrew Bosworth, a Facebook vice president, said in a Twitter post.

Trump’s campaign hired Cambridge Analytica in June 2016 and paid it more than $6.2 million, according to Federal Election Commission records.

Cambridge Analytica says it uses “behavioral microtargeting,” or combining analysis of people’s personalities with demographics, to predict and influence mass behavior. It says it has data on 220 million Americans, two-thirds of the U.S. population.

It has worked on other campaigns in the United States and other countries, and it is funded by Robert Mercer, a prominent supporter of politically conservative groups.

Facebook in its statement described a rocky relationship with Cambridge Analytica and two individuals going back to 2015.

That year, Facebook said, it learned that Kogan, the Cambridge University professor, lied to the company and violated its policies by sharing data that he acquired with a so-called “research app” that used Facebook’s login system.

Kogan was not immediately available for comment.

The app was downloaded by about 270,000 people. Facebook said Kogan gained access to profile and other information “in a legitimate way” but “he did not subsequently abide by our rules” when he passed the data to SCL/Cambridge Analytica and Wylie of Eunoia Technologies. Eunoia did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Facebook said it cut ties to Kogan’s app when it learned of the violation in 2015, and asked for certification from Kogan and all parties he had given data to that the information had been destroyed.

Although all certified they had destroyed the data, Facebook said it received reports in the past several days that “not all data was deleted,” prompting the suspension announced on Friday.

source: interaksyon.com