As you should know, Facebook shared the platform’s user data with device and software vendors as part of their associations. Without hesitation, we already knew these days the extent of these agreements.
Facebook responded to a data request from the House Energy & Commerce Committee with a 747-page response describing social networking data exchange agreements with other companies. In total, Facebook has shared user information with 52 companies, including Chinese companies such as Alibaba, Huawei, Lenovo and Oppo. It has already closed associations with 38 of them (some of them are in debt to companies that have carried out important activities, such as HP / Palm and Inq), with seven more expiring in July 2018 and one more in October.
Three associations must continue, says Facebook. Apple has an agreement extending beyond October, Amazon also have an appointment while Tobii your collaboration is required for an eye tracking application that makes Facebook accessible to ALS patients. There are also course alliances with Alibaba, Mozilla y Opera to enable Facebook notifications in browsers, even if this does not include access to users’ data.
On the other hand, Facebook also acknowledged that it gave 61 third-party application developers up to six months more time to reduce their data retrieval practices after implementing stricter shared-use controls in 2014, among others. Hinge y Spotify. Five other developers could have accessed “limited friendship data” through a beta test, but no details on what that meant.
While these associations did not necessarily have malicious intent, there is a presumption that Facebook may use the form to share more data in addition to an FTC consent decree requiring the site to obtain permission before retrieving more data from those it allows. . privacy settings for a person. Allegedly, the providers in these associations were providers, not third parties, and he claimed that he had not violated the decree in his most recent reply.
The document arrives almost two weeks after Facebook will provide Congress with a full 452 pages of answers to questions that Mark Zuckerberg did not respond immediately during his testimony. But that does not explain everything. The Washington Post noted that Facebook did not explain why it had not listened to applications such as the Cambridge Analytica scandal’s thisismydigital life ‘application, or whether it had considered or not charged a fee for displaying ads.
There were also hundreds of questions that California Representative Anna Eshoo received from users. This new mass of answers may be useful, but it still will not satisfy everyone who wants to know the whole range of bad Facebook data practices.
