By Deepa Seetharaman
Facebook Inc. ignited a firestorm over how it manages
third-party access to its users' information, after the social
network said a firm with ties to the 2016 Trump campaign improperly
kept data for years despite saying it had destroyed those
records.
U.S. and British lawmakers slammed Facebook over the weekend for
not providing more information about how the data firm, Cambridge
Analytica, came to access information about potentially tens of
millions of the social network's members without their explicit
permission.
"This is a big deal, when you have that amount of data. And the
privacy violations there are significant," Sen. Jeff Flake (R.,
Ariz.), a member of the Senate Judiciary Committee, said in an
appearance on CNN. "So, the question is, who knew it? When did they
know it? How long did this go on? And what happens to that data
now?"
The attorney general in Massachusetts said in social-media posts
Saturday that her office planned to launch an investigation into
the matter.
Damian Collins, the U.K. lawmaker who chairs a parliamentary
committee on media and culture, said he intended to ask Facebook
Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg to testify before the group, or
send a senior executive to do so, as part of its inquiry into how
social-media manipulation affected Britain's referendum decision to
exit from the European Union.
Late Friday, Facebook said it suspended Cambridge and two
individuals -- Aleksandr Kogan, a psychology professor from the
University of Cambridge, and Christopher Wylie, who helped found
Cambridge -- after hearing "reports" they had violated Facebook
policies that govern how third-party developers can deploy user
data they obtained from the company. Facebook didn't elaborate on
the source of its information.
Facebook said it learned in 2015 that Mr. Kogan broke Facebook
policy and shared the user data with third parties. The company
said it demanded he and third parties with access to the data
delete those records but learned this month the data hadn't been
destroyed.
Facebook executives spent much of Saturday arguing what happened
didn't constitute a data breach -- even as they and the company
acknowledged Mr. Kogan and Cambridge abused user data that
previously was provided openly to third parties.
The episode highlighted Facebook's continuing struggle to grasp
how its platform and the data it generates are handled by others.
It comes as Facebook struggles to respond to last fall's disclosure
that Russian-backed actors leveraged its tools to manipulate
Americans during and after the 2016 U.S. presidential race.
Rep. Adam Schiff of California, the top Democrat on the House
Intelligence Committee, said lawmakers should investigate how
Cambridge got hold of the data. "We need to find out what we can
about the misappropriation of the privacy, the private information
of tens of millions of Americans," Mr. Schiff told ABC News on
Sunday.
The Russian manipulation disclosed last year showed how a small
group of pro-Kremlin actors created fake accounts to sow discord
through posts, images and videos shared widely on Facebook. The
activity disclosed Friday is a case where outsiders harvested
Facebook user data and deployed it seemingly out of public
view.
"This could be a data privacy reckoning for Americans. It's a
wake up call," said David Carroll, an advocate for increased
regulation of Facebook and an associate professor of media design
at the New School's Parsons School of Design.
"We are in the process of conducting a comprehensive internal
and external review as we work to determine the accuracy of the
claims that the Facebook data in question still exists," Paul
Grewal, Facebook's deputy general counsel, said in a written
statement. "That is where our focus lies as we remain committed to
vigorously enforcing our policies to protect people's
information."
The current controversy has its roots in a 2007 decision by
Facebook to give outsiders access to the company's "social graph"
-- the friend lists, interests and "likes" that tied Facebook's
user base together. Tapping that rich store of information required
that a person create an app and plug it into Facebook's
platform.
The move helped Facebook become a fixture in its members' lives,
catapulting the company from 58 million users to more than 2
billion today. It also addressed criticism from people who argued
the company shouldn't have sole custody over the data generated by
users.
Users of dating apps who signed in using Facebook, for example,
could see which friends they had in common with a potential date --
even if those mutual friends didn't use the app. President Barack
Obama's 2012 re-election campaign created a voter-outreach app that
plugged into the Facebook platform to find potential supporters
among a user's friends.
In 2014, Facebook said it would reverse course after users
questioned their data being shared with outsiders without their
knowledge. Those changes went into effect in 2015, forcing many
dating, job-search and political apps to close their doors, and
sparking a fresh round of criticism that Facebook changed its rules
at whim.
Despite the changes, Facebook couldn't ensure data already
gleaned by developers wasn't shared with third parties. Such a move
would violate the Facebook policies governing how third-party
developers can deploy data they obtained from the company.
In a Friday evening post, Facebook said it had learned in 2015
that Mr. Kogan broke its data policies when he shared user data he
gathered from his personality-prediction app,
"thisisyourdigitallife," to third parties including Cambridge and
Mr. Wylie.
Cambridge Analytica has said it didn't use Facebook data
collected by Mr. Kogan's company, Global Science Research, during
the 2016 U.S. presidential election.
Facebook said about 270,000 people downloaded the app, giving
consent for Mr. Kogan to access information such as their city or
content they had liked. Mr. Kogan also could see some information
about friends whose privacy settings allowed the access of such
data.
A 2011 paper co-written by Facebook researchers said the average
Facebook user had 190 friends. That could mean that through the
270,000 people who downloaded Mr. Kogan's app, data from 51.3
million people were obtained.
A Facebook spokesman said the company's goal in 2015 was
securing the data in question, a goal it believed it had
accomplished at the time. The company reiterated that it didn't
consider the abuse as a "data breach" because Mr. Kogan gained
access to the data through legitimate means.
--
Dave Michaels
contributed to this article.
(END) Dow Jones Newswires
March 18, 2018 19:27 ET (23:27 GMT)
Copyright (c) 2018 Dow Jones & Company, Inc.
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