This was how FB has always designed to work from the beginning
Not exactly. In all fairness, as Zuck points out, this is a key part of the story, and in theory, why this is different:
In 2015, we learned from journalists at The Guardian that Kogan had shared data from his app with Cambridge Analytica. It is against our policies for developers to share data without people's consent.
This raises the question of what Facebook was doing (if anything) to prevent this sort of action, but the fact that they just took CA at their word that they deleted this ill-gotten data (of course they didn't), it makes me think they did very little. I think this is just as concerning as any other part of this story. Even if people are knowingly willing to hand over data to Facebook (or the devs of some app) in exchange to use a service, they wouldn't think that it's a free for all and anyone can mine the data for whatever they want.
> It is against our policies for developers to share data without people's consent.
Not to mention that it's arguable that "consent" was really given for facebook to share the data in the first place. I'd be interested to see some polling results asking if facebook users knew what facebook was up to and whether they feel OK with it.
I'd also be really interested to see screenshots of what the users saw when they clicked "ok." I've been able to find a few screenshots online for other apps, but nothing that indicates what it would have looked like in 2013.
Nice. This doesn't seem to mention sharing data about your friends though? I wonder if that would have been mentioned separately to grant access to your friends data?
Thanks for playing into the story that Facebook created to set the conversation.
This was openly covered last year by BBC when they interviewed Trump's digital campaign manager at the time Theresa Hong [interview linked]. The campaign spent $16M on Facebook. Understandably, Facebook gave them the white glove treatment, even had their own employees embedded in Project Alamo (the headquarters of the campaign's digital arm).
But today Facebook claims they had no idea who one of their multi-million-dollar clients in 2015-2016 were. That it was just some random quiz-making hacker dude selling data to some other random company.
This piece of work posted today by Facebook is what we call damage control. Don't expect the truth from it-- it will contain truths, but it will not be the truth of the matter. And don't let it set your dialogue, man.
Not exactly. In all fairness, as Zuck points out, this is a key part of the story, and in theory, why this is different:
In 2015, we learned from journalists at The Guardian that Kogan had shared data from his app with Cambridge Analytica. It is against our policies for developers to share data without people's consent.
This raises the question of what Facebook was doing (if anything) to prevent this sort of action, but the fact that they just took CA at their word that they deleted this ill-gotten data (of course they didn't), it makes me think they did very little. I think this is just as concerning as any other part of this story. Even if people are knowingly willing to hand over data to Facebook (or the devs of some app) in exchange to use a service, they wouldn't think that it's a free for all and anyone can mine the data for whatever they want.