FTC says Facebook violated privacy order, proposes ban on monetizing youth data
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The current status quo is far from anything reasonable and I agree selling data for anyone just is not great, but still, for the sake of incremental changes for the better, I really, really hope they carry through with this. Removing ads/monetization for kids probably will avoid so many stupid awful problems that exist today.. ads for kids has been a thing forever and it's always sucked, far worse than barraging adults imo. At least I sort of understand the deal I am making when I sign up for these "free" services and have my general views on the world set, not to mention some amount of skepticism (I mean you can't really blame kids for being gullible!)
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I agree, but I don't think they need to transfer info to developers to violate kids' privacy, which is supposed to be what this is about. When they transfer data from the Info Hoover Dept. to the Ad Targeting Department and then RUN THAT AD, I feel that is a violation of the privacy of children who are not mature enough to make a consent decision about their data.
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Plenty to follow you around and push content at you based on the sites you visit, at the very least. They know a whole lot about you, they just haven't tied that cluster of information to a specific individual - yet.
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No, it really fucking isn't. Given how easy it is to match up Facebook's data with other data you've purchased, it doesn't matter.
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How about a law that says a company can't profit off of my data unless they first pay me for it?
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This statement reveals Meta is coding their language for the conservative judicial system. The argument they are making - that the FTC is abusing authority that should belong to Congress - is exactly the kind of legal vehicle conservative jurists are salivating for to take on the Chevron doctrine. Meta is trying to tell the FTC that they will pursue a case that will undermine the entire administrative state. Translated, they are saying "we have the money to be the tool the Supreme Court needs to shut down the authority of any agency to do anything without explicit congressional authorization."
Just a quick background - many conservative jurists don't like the idea of vague and broad Congressional authorization to set up an administrative entity ( e.g. the EPA) to regulate things that they think should be congressional votes (e.g. CO2 emissions). Anyone who knows how Congress functions knows that having them set up every administrative function on a party-line vote is a bad idea for any kind of government oversight given the complexity involved. Meta is shouting their intentions here.
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When I read the histrionic “but but TikTok!” quote I realized yet again Meta is a dishonest disaster.
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That thing is bowing behind the bridge! That won’t sound very good.
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faustshausuk
Ars Scholae Palatinae
I'd like Meta to remind me: who is currently asking their users to submit claims in a class action settlement related to multiple lawsuits about the sale and misuse of data? Clue: it's Facebook. https://facebookuserprivacysettlement.com/
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^ This.
Want to sell someone else info on my habits? A) I need to opt in, and B) You need to cut me a check.
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I think it was Charlie Stross who said that large corporations are effectively AIs, in the worst sense. They have agency and vast resources and are absolutely amoral. They will bribe and lie and co-opt the political and regulatory processes wherever it's financially advantageous to do so. ( Bribe = make campaign contributions, Lie = PR, co-opt = revolving door).
Fox having to pay another corporation and not admit guilt is hardly a win. If you want this fixed then you need to attack the roots of the problem:
- campaign finance reform (Where I live this is much more tightly controlled than the US)
- Stronger personal accountability for serious corporate misbehavior. Zuckerberg, Murdoch, the Sacklers, have done really horrible things and the worst they face is their wealth dropping a few percent. And when your wealth is in the billions it has no real impact on them.
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How would you answer it if you were facebook? Knowing that even if you simply lie or misconstrue your own actions and motives there will be hordes of people defending you on the internet.
People who in one comment bemoan liars or politicians (yet never complain about any Republican) then in the next pretend that Mark Zuckerberg cannot tell a lie and boy did you see those stupid questions from <insert non-Republican politician> or <non-conservative> commentator?
Then the conversation ceases to be about Facebook or the topic
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How about a REAL penalty. Like 200% of all income made from breaking the rules as a fine. Not profit but income.
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Anything that makes Facebook this mad is something that should be implemented immediately and with maximum enforcement.
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2 things..
1. Good. Nail em to the wall. “Meta” does to much unscrupulous shit and gets away with it. Maybe we can have the EU like data protection here in the U.S., even if Congress wont do it.
2. We dont talk about fight club!
1. Good. Nail em to the wall. “Meta” does to much unscrupulous shit and gets away with it. Maybe we can have the EU like data protection here in the U.S., even if Congress wont do it.
2. We dont talk about fight club!
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How long before FaceBook spins this so getting "input" from the FTC on new applications is their idea?
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Considering various states are repealing their child labor laws, their age of consent and marriage laws, Facebooks view is very much in keeping with the new vision of '10 years olds are adults' taking over.
Never mind they're also wanting to make voting age 25 because 20 year olds are too irresponsible to vote properly.
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I cannot understand how people defend Zuck. He is a criminal and should be in jail.
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This is wrong. The "anonymous" users have advertising IDs. It only takes an advertising database compromise, leak etc, which happens all the time, for that to become exactly the problem you are asserting isn't happening. We have seen several multimillion dollar cases about this data.
So just stop making up rubbish. This is an ACTUAL problem and Facebook knowingly puts the data at risk and justifies it by waving around all the money they make from it.
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So Meta is complaining that it has already been forced to spend "vast" sums on "industry leading" privacy protection measures?
Good.
Now if they continue doing exactly that for the next decade or so they might have a chance at changing the previous decade's worth of negative public perception regarding their shitty record on protecting their user's privacy.
Put another way, I'mma need a tardigrade-sized violin for this one.
Good.
Now if they continue doing exactly that for the next decade or so they might have a chance at changing the previous decade's worth of negative public perception regarding their shitty record on protecting their user's privacy.
Put another way, I'mma need a tardigrade-sized violin for this one.
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If I've parsed the article correctly, privacy violations between 2017-2019 resulted in the 2020 Order, which the FTC is now seeking to modify/expand on the basis of additional (alleged) violations.
Software/platform companies collecting and monetising user PII should be held to a higher standard regarding bugs/vulnerabilities which could potentially expose user data or negatively affect user's privacy. I would hope that the reasons for this don't need explaining. As to profit motive, Meta is a publicly traded corporation, they don't do anything without a profit motive. This includes failing to employ an appropriate amount of QC/testing personnel and giving them enough time to do their jobs before rolling out new features/apps specifically aimed at children.
I doubt that such vulnerabilities are already viewed as "privacy violations" as a matter of FTC policy, but perhaps they should be (within some reasonable time frame for the company to deal with such violations, lets say 48 hours for the sake of argument). You want to store and monetise PII, you don't get to use the "sorry, we screwed up" excuse and walk away scot-free. Want PII? Be better or get fined. Took you a month to disclose a vulnerability? Be better or get fined. And so forth.
Who else apart from Meta would be discovering, disclosing and patching vulns in Meta's systems?
I hope those responses are appropriately rational.
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You mean similar to the EU? That's not gonna happen. Because the EU is a bunch of socialists. And socialists are basically communists. And communists are America's enemies. Well, except for fascist neo-communists like Putin; he's our friend now, at least in magaworld, because Trump likes him and because Putin's got dirt on Trump.
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fellow human
Ars Praefectus
My young daughter's friends are all on Messenger Kids and she keeps bugging me to let her have an account. This article is a nice reminder that, rather than bend my principles and open my firewall to Meta properties, what I need to do is convince their parents to move to something like Signal.
Yes, I will think of the children.
edit: don't forget to add a FB blocklist to your Pi-Hole: https://blocklistproject.github.io/Lists/facebook.txt
Yes, I will think of the children.
edit: don't forget to add a FB blocklist to your Pi-Hole: https://blocklistproject.github.io/Lists/facebook.txt
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Let's try to think of the positives: our children's online profiles will be much more advanced and sophisticated that ours were growing up. That's progress baby!
end sarcasm
end sarcasm
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I'm not wondering about what Facebook is saying, I am wondering what they are doing.
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And Meta will continue to lie and surreptitiously collect and sell such data until the consequences are meaningful.
And when your market cap is over $600 billion, those consequences must be BIG.
And when your market cap is over $600 billion, those consequences must be BIG.
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The real one: http://microart.kiev.ua/images/miniatures/preview/44.jpg
Other works by the artist(Mykola Syadristy): http://microart.kiev.ua/en/gallery
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Not all of them, there’s one that charges $60 commission each to sell your NFTs, for a guaranteed minimum price of $1, which they meet by buying them themselves if they can’t make a sale (with, naturally, zero effort). In other words, turn any NFT into a supposedly tax-deductible loss for only $59, at least until the taxman bothers to prosecute everyone for what’s fairly blatant tax evasion.
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Social media is social disease. Its core business model is to invade personal privacy to improve the efficacy of state and commercial propaganda. The public health equivalent of permitting social media would be allowing open sewers, though it spreads the intellectual, emotional, and spiritual equivalents of cholera far faster than any mere bacterium.
So far as living things are concerned, there's only one natural law: adapt or die. Social media are the primary weapon in a war against objective reality. We can't adapt to what we can't perceive, or more to the point, won't believe. As Arendt said nearly three-quarters of a century ago, "…the masses…believe everything and nothing, think that everything was possible and that nothing was true." It's so apt it's worth quoting her in full:
"In an ever-changing, incomprehensible world the masses had reached the point where they would, at the same time, believe everything and nothing, think that everything was possible and that nothing was true. …Mass propaganda discovered that its audience was ready at all times to believe the worst, no matter how absurd, and did not particularly object to being deceived because it held every statement to be a lie anyhow.
The totalitarian mass leaders based their propaganda on the correct psychological assumption that, under such conditions, one could make people believe the most fantastic statements one day, and trust that if the next day they were given irrefutable proof of their falsehood, they would take refuge in cynicism; instead of deserting the leaders who had lied to them, they would protest that they had known all along that the statement was a lie and would admire the leaders for their superior tactical cleverness.”
— Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism
So far as living things are concerned, there's only one natural law: adapt or die. Social media are the primary weapon in a war against objective reality. We can't adapt to what we can't perceive, or more to the point, won't believe. As Arendt said nearly three-quarters of a century ago, "…the masses…believe everything and nothing, think that everything was possible and that nothing was true." It's so apt it's worth quoting her in full:
"In an ever-changing, incomprehensible world the masses had reached the point where they would, at the same time, believe everything and nothing, think that everything was possible and that nothing was true. …Mass propaganda discovered that its audience was ready at all times to believe the worst, no matter how absurd, and did not particularly object to being deceived because it held every statement to be a lie anyhow.
The totalitarian mass leaders based their propaganda on the correct psychological assumption that, under such conditions, one could make people believe the most fantastic statements one day, and trust that if the next day they were given irrefutable proof of their falsehood, they would take refuge in cynicism; instead of deserting the leaders who had lied to them, they would protest that they had known all along that the statement was a lie and would admire the leaders for their superior tactical cleverness.”
— Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism
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