'We don't sell people's data,' says Facebook's Zuckerberg

SAN FRANCISCO, United States — Facebook co-founder and chief Mark Zuckerberg on Thursday renewed his defense of the social network's business, arguing that targeting ads based on interests was different from selling people's data.

"If we're committed to serving everyone, then we need a service that is affordable to everyone," Zuckerberg said in an opinion piece published in the Wall Street Journal.

"The best way to do that is to offer services for free, which ads enable us to do."


2018 was a horrific year for Facebook, marked by a series of scandals over data protection and privacy and concerns that the leading social network had been manipulated by foreign interests for political purposes.

Despite the scandals, Facebook revenue and user numbers have continued to grow.

Making ads relevant, and less annoying, involves understanding people's interests, according to Zuckerberg.

Facebook uses "signals" such as pages users "like" and what they share about themselves to target advertising.

"Sometimes this means people assume we do things that we don't do," Zuckerberg said of the business of supporting the social network with targeted ads.

"For example, we don't sell people's data, even though it's often reported that we do."

Selling user data would not only undermine essential trust in the social network, it would go against Facebook's business interests because rivals could use it to compete for advertising, he reasoned.

Facebook also provides users with controls regarding information used for ad targeting and lets them block advertisers,  Zuckerberg pointed out.

Criticism of Facebook has included the social network being used as a platform to spread divisive or misleading information, as was the case during the 2016 election that put US President Donald Trump in the White House.

"Clickbait and other junk may drive engagement in the near term, but it would be foolish for us to show this intentionally, because it's not what people want," Zuckerberg wrote.

"Another question is whether we leave harmful or divisive content up because it drives engagement. We don’t."

Facebook has been investing in artificial intelligence and adding employees devoted to ferreting out content that violates the social network's rules.

The expense could weigh on its quarterly earnings, due for release next week.

"The only reason bad content remains is because the people and artificial-intelligence systems we use to review it are not perfect -- not because we have an incentive to ignore it," he said.

source: philstar.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

Tech spats spark fears of ‘digital protectionism’

WASHINGTON — As American tech giants extend their global reach, fears are growing on their side of the Atlantic over trade barriers some see as “digital protectionism”.

While China has long been a difficult market for US firms to navigate, tensions have been rising with the European Union on privacy, antitrust and other issues, impacting tech firms such as Google, Facebook and Uber.

In recent weeks, Europe’s highest court struck down an agreement which allowed US firms to transfer personal data out of the region without running afoul of privacy rules.

In parallel, Brussels is looking to create a new “digital single market” simplifying rules for operating across EU borders — but which could also include new regulations for online “platforms”.

Some see this as a jab at US retailers like Amazon, “sharing economy” services like Airbnb or even news outfits.

Ed Black, president of the Computer and Communications Industry Association, said the platform proposal “has the potential to be troublesome.”

“Nobody has defined what a platform is,” Black told AFP. “It feels like a proposal to solve a non-problem.”

After the European Court of Justice invalidated the so-called “Safe Harbor” data-sharing agreement this month, Secretary of Commerce Penny Pritzker said Washington was “deeply disappointed.”

For the past 15 years, the key transatlantic accord allowed tech firms like Facebook to operate on both sides of the ocean without running afoul of EU privacy laws.

The ruling, Pritzker said, “creates significant uncertainty for both US and EU companies and consumers and puts at risk the thriving transatlantic digital economy.”

Undercurrent of fear

“We’re waiting to see which way Europe goes,” says Daniel Castro, vice president at the Information Technology & Innovation Foundation, a Washington think tank.

Castro detects “an undercurrent of fear” in Europe because of the popularity of services such as Google and Facebook but argues that the US and EU “need to be on the same side when it comes to free trade.”

Another source of friction is Europe’s effort to enforce the “right to be forgotten,” allowing individuals to remove online content from searches that are outdated or inaccurate.

France has ordered Google to carry this out worldwide, not just in Europe — but US firms see this as a form of censorship, effectively enabling people to rewrite history to hide embarrassing data.

“You’re taking about Europe imposing its version of how the world should be on everyone else,” Castro said.

President Barack Obama expressed concerns about digital trade barriers in an interview earlier this year with Re/code.

“We have owned the Internet. Our companies have created it, expanded it, perfected it in ways that (European firms) can’t compete,” Obama said in response to a question about European actions in the digital sphere.

“And oftentimes what is portrayed as high-minded positions on issues sometimes is just designed to carve out some of their commercial interests.”

Buy time for Europe

That view was echoed by Kati Suominen, who heads the Future of Trade initiative for the Center for Strategic and International Studies, a think tank.

Europe sees it is lagging and is moving on policies in order “to buy time,” she argued.

“Europe is seeking to build its own digital economy by complicating the operations of foreign companies on European soil. In that sense, it is protectionism,” she said.

Rather than throw up new barriers, she argued, Europe should be tearing them if it wishes to foster a digital economy — notably to enable better access to venture capital.

Last month Guenther Oettinger, the EU commissioner for the digital economy and society, brushed aside suggestions of protectionism.

“Our rules on a European level are relevant for everybody, for European producers and players, for Asian players, and for American players as well,” he said during a visit to San Francisco.

Snowden impact

While Google has been the target of a contentious EU anti-trust probe among other issues, Facebook has been especially impacted by privacy rules, with Ireland become the latest to examine the legality of its transfer of user data across the Atlantic.

Belgian officials have also sought to prevent Facebook from using a data “cookie” that gathers information about users. The social media giant says the tool helps verify legitimate accounts and combat spam.

A key element in the US-EU row over privacy has been the fear that US Internet firms are handing over data to the National Security Agency, in light of revelations from former intelligence contractor Edward Snowden.

To address those concerns, US lawmakers have moved to pass a bill allowing non-citizens to enforce their data protection rights in US courts under the Privacy Act.

Berin Szoka, president of the activist group TechFreedom, said the bill was a step toward “repairing America’s tarnished image on data privacy.”

He noted that the failure until now to address the issue in Washington “has provoked an international crisis — one that could lead to a European blockade of American Internet companies.”

Suominen argued that the US and EU have an chance to foster a flourishing digital economy — with appropriate rules — as part of the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) currently being negotiated.

But she warned that policymakers need to bring their thinking up to date.

“Policymakers are struggling to understand what these technologies are and what they can do, and we have archaic policies from the 20th century,” she said. “I worry that we are not on the right path for the 21st century.”

source: interaksyon.com

Should you be paranoid about data privacy on the Internet, or even on your smartphone?

It did not come slowly.

A random search for a random thing on a random site for some reason, just a minute after closing the tab and refreshing another, an ad for the site appears on Facebook.

This is what it’s like using the Internet in the United States. This is one of the reasons to wonder if the National Security Agency (NSA) really does take data from social media.

Hair dryers I looked at Amazon just a few moments ago suddenly appear on the ads part of my Facebook timeline. Shopping sites and food delivery services pop up between updates of friends. Suddenly Tumblr has sponsored pages you don’t remember ever seeing before.

I first noticed these ads creeping its way into all of my social media a few days into my stay in New York. I had finally gotten a phone and opened the Twitter app to check my feed. A few swipes down there it was: an ad for a store in Manhattan complete with a picture of the Empire State Building.

It seemed weird to notice it at first but I barely saw ads in my Twitter feed when I was in Manila.

Oh sure there are ads on Facebook and your email, I see those all the time. But the speed at which these ads come on to your social media here is just unbelievable. And it isn’t just Google ads. These are ads tailored for you; based on where you are. I was on vacation in California over Christmas and I got ads for In-N-Out, in New York I get ads about Bank of America and the New York City Ballet (and not Shake Shack oddly).

A friend who is doing his concentration (in my school each student chooses a concentration, kind of like a major) on health and science wrote an article about privacy and phones. He told me that because I kept my location services on and that I check my social media, there is a lot of data that my phone is giving away about me.

Data, like — I get lost most of the time so my location services are always on or I keep searching for cheap hair dryers and Macbook chargers on Amazon.

Companies pay a lot for that information. Well maybe not the getting lost part, maybe, I hope.

This kind of advertising is just so common in the United States that so many companies do this kind of thing.

I’m going to go out on a limb and say some companies in the Philippines aren’t that sold on the idea yet. But I’m not going to be surprised if pretty soon you open up your Twitter in Manila and see the same exact thing happening.

Just imagine a tweet from Jollibee on your feed at 3PM even if no one retweeted them and you don’t follow them. And you notice it because you tweeted just seconds ago about palabok.

It’s not a wonder why Americans become so paranoid about their privacy over the Internet.

I can’t say I’m paranoid about my data being analyzed by companies or worse the NSA. I’m still at the point where I find it amazing that I suddenly get location-based tweets.

But the moment I get an ad about beer just as I walk past a random bar on a random street then I think that’s when I’ll double check my privacy settings on my phone.

So NSA if you ever read this, I do like beer and hair dryers and cheap chargers. Also
Shake Shack. Build my profile based on that.

source: interaksyon.com