Submitted by As Facebook sought to become the world’s dominant social media service, it struck agreements allowing phone and other device makers access to vast amounts of its users’ personal information.
Facebook has reached data-sharing partnerships with at least 60 device makers – including Apple, Amazon, BlackBerry, Microsoft and Samsung – over the last decade, starting before Facebook apps were widely available on smartphones, company officials said. The deals allowed Facebook to expand its reach and let device makers offer customers popular features of the social network, such as messaging, “like” buttons and address books.
Well, that’s one way for companies like Apple and Microsoft to claim to care about privacy, while at the same time still getting access to vast amounts of personal data.
I’m particularly annoyed that facebook was sharing the data of users who explicitly opted out of 3rd party sharing. One good thing to come out of this scandal is that the truth came out. Yet all too often the truth comes out and then nothing changes (as with snowden revealing government crimes). A lawsuit would send a strong message to companies that they don’t have a right to do this, but in reality the corporations can just grease the hands of politicians as usual to let them do whatever they want.
The problem is if enough people actually cared, they’d stop using Facebook. Until or unless this happens there will be no change, because the majority of people either don’t care about this or don’t see the problem with it. Most people will gladly give their personal information away for a bit more convenience. Look no further than Siri versus Alexa for an example of this in action; Siri collects far less data and is more limited as a result, and people prefer Alexa despite the privacy implications. It’s sad, but that’s how people think. Give them the choice between paying money or data, and most people will opt to pay with data instead.
darknexus,
I read recently that they actually are loosing users in droves.
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/facebooks-younger-users-are-abandoning-…
But the problem is that migrating from facebook may not help if the privacy violations are widespread in the industry; the article even points out that some users are migrating to other facebook owned properties. If facebook were successfully prosecuted, then suddenly all corporations would start to take privacy more seriously than they currently do.
We’ll see what the impact will be with the EU’s recent legislation once the dust settles down, it could be a good model for the US to implement (though I very much doubt that US politicians would get behind it against the wishes of corporate sponsors).
The thing that really gets me about my Galaxy phone is that any Facebook owned app will entirely bypass Google Play to update itself using it’s own update software. This is annoying and side loaded apps like this should not be allowed.
I remember when social media first became a thing back in 2004 or so I thought to myself, all of these millions and millions of people are just giving away their personal information for free to a big corporation who will simply sell it for profit. I never joined any social media much to the dismay of family and friends. Now after numerous data breaches and news that user information has been mined, distilled and sold to marketing firms the world over I feel vindicated. FaceBook users should be mad as hell and start an avalanche on Facebook of complaints. People should also write their local lawmakers to demand action.
When I read the article it feels like Facebook knew where they were going right from the start .. This is an intelligence operation not a company..
https://appleinsider.com/articles/18/06/04/cook-denies-apple-request…
phti,
And I’d like to believe that. They also denied involvement in the NSA’s prism problem, and it’s hard to imagine why the NSA’s internal file servers were setup with false evidence to wrongly implicate apple.
https://techcrunch.com/2014/01/24/apple-tim-cook-nsa/
He also made statements about apple’s inability to wiretap facetime and imessage, claims which were proven wrong by security researchers.
https://bgr.com/2015/08/06/iphone-fbi-imessage-facetime-backdoor/
I don’t think tim cook has it in for apple users (not as badly as other corporations anyways). Here’s the thing though, whether we like it or not, survival of the fittest in the corporate world largely incentivizes CEOs to always paint the company in the best light possible – even when it’s not true. There’s just very little incentive to be honest when honesty would hurt the company financially and result in termination for the under-performing, albeit honest, CEO.
Personally, I wouldn’t avoid apple products for this particular reason. Microsoft and google are known to be pretty bad (and likely worse) about privacy.
However I think apple’s monopolistic approach to service and supply chains is absolutely despicable and hurts apple’s customers. This iron fist approach is a big reason for me to avoid apple.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9-NU7yOSElE
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oNl2q6YZXlA
Interesting. So you have chosen not to go with the company that, all things considered, is probably best for privacy because you disagree with something else they do even more. This is the point I was getting at: to most people, what someone does with their personal information is pretty low on their list of priorities compared to other factors about the service or company in question.
darknexus,
Well, that’s the problem when we have too few choices isn’t it? Vote with your feet is the mantra, one which you as well as others like to to promote. I don’t have any issue with this in principal, but it’s highly dependent upon having good viable choices in the first place, and herein lies the weakness of this mantra. We as consumers and voters are always blamed for making poor choices. Yet when there aren’t good choices it genuinely isn’t a reflection of what we would have chosen had our choices been available. Often times a whole plethora of issues become collapses into very few buckets which we are forced to be pigeonholed into. In the absence of healthy competition companies as well as political parties can get away with things that the public opposes, yet we’ve had little say in.
This is a serious problem for me, I buy a lot of stuff that wouldn’t be worthy of my money if only there was better competition. I suspect the same is true for a lot of people on a whole range of things. This is all very easy to complain about, but hard to actually fix because it means fighting the momentum of incumbents who would rather we didn’t have more choices.