Fucking Facebook's terrible year isn't over yet

With two more weeks to go, Facebook's horribad year is still getting worse, as reported by Gizmodo:

According to a bombshell report in the New York Times on Tuesday, Facebook’s behind-the-scenes efforts to give select corporate partners access to user data have been far more expansive than previously reported, including allowing certain third-party companies access to user contact lists and access to users’ private messages.

Yes, that’s right, Facebook gave Netflix and Spotify the ability to read users’ messages, and other tech giants including Microsoft, Amazon, and Sony access to data on users’ friends, according to hundreds of internal documents obtained by the paper and interviews with dozens of “former employees of Facebook and its corporate partners.” 

Not only did Facebook allow 150 companies, including Microsoft, Netflix, Spotify, Amazon, and Yahoo, access to users’ private messages, they also allowed them unprecedented access to users’ personal data. According to BuzzFeed News:

Facebook allowed Microsoft’s search engine Bing to see the names of nearly all users’ friends without their consent, and allowed Spotify, Netflix, and the Royal Bank of Canada to read, write, and delete users’ private messages, and see participants on a thread.

Let that sink in for a second: these companies could not only see your messages, they could delete any of them which they didn't like, allowing them to censor Facebook users without their consent, and possibly even without them noticing. It's the nuclear option of damage-control PR. And that's not all they could do.

It also allowed Amazon to get users’ names and contact information through their friends, let Apple access users' Facebook contacts and calendars even if users had disabled data sharing, and let Yahoo view streams of friends’ posts “as recently as this summer,” despite publicly claiming it had stopped sharing such information a year ago, the report said. Collectively, applications made by these technology companies sought the data of hundreds of millions of people a month.

So, yes, in case you were wondering, Facebook's regard for your personal privacy, safety, and fundamental right to self-expression really is utterly non-existent, and the situation is far worse than we knew... with, doubtless, even worse revelations to come. Because this is just what we're learning in spite of Facebook's best efforts to keep all of this under wraps; what we'll learn next year, when the Democratic Party takes control of the U.S. Congress and its various investigative and oversight committees, is anyone's guess, but there's almost certainly more to learn here.


This also has likely implications for the U.S. Federal Trade Commission's recently-launched investigation into the degree to which Facebook has complied, or failed to comply, with their Consent Decree Agreement with the FTC, which pretty much prohibits exactly this sort of activity. From the original NY Times article:

Data privacy experts disputed Facebook’s assertion that most partnerships were exempted from the regulatory requirements, expressing skepticism that businesses as varied as device makers, retailers and search companies would be viewed alike by the agency. “The only common theme is that they are partnerships that would benefit the company in terms of development or growth into an area that they otherwise could not get access to,” said Ashkan Soltani, former chief technologist at the F.T.C.

Mr. Soltani and three former employees of the F.T.C.’s consumer protection division, which brought the case that led to the consent decree, said in interviews that its data-sharing deals had probably violated the agreement.

“This is just giving third parties permission to harvest data without you being informed of it or giving consent to it,” said David Vladeck, who formerly ran the F.T.C.’s consumer protection bureau. “I don’t understand how this unconsented-to data harvesting can at all be justified under the consent decree.”

All of which likely means that Facebook's 2019 will start off just as horribad as their 2018 ended, with no end in sight. Mazel tov!

About the only thing that Facebook can hope for, here, is that 2018 will end without any more stories of this sort breaking, allowing their PR people at least a couple of weeks' break to spend time with their families over the holidays. If I were them, though, I wouldn't get my hopes up to high, on that front; I have a feeling that we'll get word of at least one more Facebook fuck-up, if not two, before the new year dawns.

So... have you deleted Facebook yet? And, if not, why not? Seriously, what are you waiting for?