I am surprised... that anyone was surprised...

Turning from Valve to bigger fish, we have a new report from the Wall Street Journal, reported here by Engadget because WSJ's paywall is ridiculous:

Meta’s “Responsible Innovation Team,” a group meant to address “potential harms to society” caused by Facebook's products, is no more. The Wall Street Journal reports that the team was recently “disbanded” though “most” members will stay on with other teams at the company. A Meta spokesperson told The Wall Street Journal the company was “committed to the team’s goals,” but didn’t provide a reason for the change in strategy.

[...]

The Responsible Innovation team isn’t the only team to recently be reshuffled. Earlier this summer, Meta reorganized its entire AI team, which included folding the Responsible AI group into its Social Impact team. The company has also been looking to cut costs as its revenue shrinks for the first time in its history. Meta has also axed some projects in its Reality Labs division and slowed its hiring amid rumors of potential layoffs.

So... Meta née Facebook, saddled with its VR division's ballooning cost and lackluster revenues, went looking something to cut for costs, and decided that the things they could afford to cut back on were ethics and responsibility. Because of course they did.

 

 

Seriously, though, after the Facebook Papers and Frances Haugen, was anyone really expecting Meta née Facebook to actually do better on this front? And, if they were, well... why? For the love of God, why?

 

More details are available from Engadget here, or from the Wall Street Journal here.

This week in Facebook: Hypocrisy, incompetence, and partisan political bias, and that's just one of their policies

As reported by HuffPost:

Under mounting pressure to quell the flood of partisan misinformation coursing through its platform, Facebook announced a new policy in September: It would stop accepting all new political ads during the week preceding the presidential election.

[...]

In theory, as Zuckerberg touted, the policy would prevent political advertisers from spreading new messages to targeted audiences before fact-checkers and journalists had time to scrutinize them — reducing the risk of false and misleading claims going viral in the run-up to the vote.

In practice, it has been a disaster. [...] Chaos ensued almost immediately: Thousands of previously approved ads from Democratic nominee Joe Biden’s campaign and multiple progressive groups were wrongly blocked due to a “technical flaw,” potentially costing hundreds of thousands of dollars in donations.President Donald Trump’s campaign managed to launch new ads post-ban. And in violation of its own rules, Facebook approved ads from the president’s campaign prematurely declaring victory, as well as hundreds of ads bearing the misleading text “ELECTION DAY IS TODAY” or “Vote Today.”

Days later, Facebook is still putting out fires amid searing accusations of partisan bias and negligence. The company’s stunning failure to properly enforce its own high-profile policy at such a critical time has raised alarm about its preparedness for the fallout of the election — the results of which could be inconclusive for days or even weeks.

“[Facebook’s] implementation certainly has only inspired more fears over how they’re going to be able to handle these last-minute election-specific rollouts,” [Jesse Lehrich, co-founder of the nonprofit Accountable Tech] said. “It constantly feels like they’re dealing with optics — they’re thinking of everything as optical problems and never as structural problems.”

And that, friends, is Facebook in a nutshell, and why I think that the U.S. DOJ's antitrust action again Google was aimed at entirely the wrong target. Google might be problematic and monopolistic, but Facebook is actively evil. Google and Amazon are cuddly kittens by comparison; sure, they might be problematic in terms of business competition, but they have nothing on the corrosive toxicity and greed of Zuckerberg & Co.

Of all the Big Tech firms, Facebook is the most responsible for the deepening divisions in our discourse and society, structurally dedicated to encouraging the worst impulses of humanity for no other reason than their own material gain. Facebook is actively undermining civility, privacy, and democracy itself, and worst of all is that they aren't even doing it for ideological reasons; no, Facebook's undermining of civilization is being done, almost entirely, for the money.

Facebook is fairly begging to be broken up, but Trump's DOJ won't touch them; after all, their "mistakes" and "accidents" seem to trend entirely in one direction, and that direction mostly favours Trump and his supporters. Hopefully the DOJ of a President Biden, or a new Congress in which Democrats control both House and Senate, will take action against the most urgent Big Tech threat.

In the meantime, it falls to the rest of us to keep on doing what we've already been doing: deleting Facebook from our lives. Facebook is the problem; it's time for more people to stop being part of that problem.

This week in Facebook: Zuckerberg throws contractors under the bus for Facebook's Kenosha fail, while deflecting responsibility...

... and if that isn't peak Facebook in a nutshell, I don't know what is.

As reported by TIME:

In a video posted to Facebook on Friday, Facebook chief executive Mark Zuckerberg said that the social media giant made a mistake by not removing a page and event that urged people in Kenosha, Wis., to carry weapons amid protests. On Tuesday night, a 17-year-old named Kyle Rittenhouse allegedly fatally shot two people and injured a third.

Zuckerberg admitted that “a bunch of people” had reported the page and said the decision to not remove it was “largely an operational mistake.”

“The contractors, the reviewers who the initial complaints were funneled to, didn’t, basically, didn’t pick this up,” Zuckerberg said in the Friday video, which was taken from a larger company-wide meeting. “And on second review, doing it more sensitively, the team that’s responsible for dangerous organizations recognized that this violated the policies and we took it down.”

He went on to deny that the shooter had followed this particular Facebook group, as if that was required for him to have decided to show up for an event which was organized on Facebook by the group; went on to announce that the shooter's Facebook and Instagram pages had been "suspended," and that the "Kenosha Guard" page had also been taken down... just hours after the public outcry started about white supremacist militia groups organizing events on Facebook that led to the shootings.

On the plus side, though, Zuckerberg did describe the shootings, accurately, as a "mass murder," so at least he's finally stopped pandering to these asshats.

At this point, it's pretty clear that Facebook is not a positive force in society; their corporate culture is, and always has been, morally bankrupt, suffering from a total lack of anything resembling actual principles. And the problem is pervasive, the result of a corporate leadership which views rules as being for other people, and morals as the small-minded thinking of the unintelligent; Facebook is a fish that's rotted from the head down, and which is thoroughly rotten.

As long as Facebook is allowed to continuing policing itself, subject only to "internal investigations" of its own failures, no matter how many lives are lost as a result of those failures, its problems will not be solved. Facebook does not have problems; Facebook is the problem. And the only solution to that problem is for Facebook is to stop being Facebook, most likely due to antitrust action breaking them up into chunks of manageable size. No other remedy can possibly begin to bring the problem of Facebook to heel.

This week in Facebook: Zuck wants in on Epic's action, picks PR fight with Apple (sorta)

Sometimes I fucking love The Reg:

Facebook has apologized to its users and advertisers for being forced to respect people’s privacy in an upcoming update to Apple’s mobile operating system – and promised it will do its best to invade their privacy on other platforms.

The antisocial network that makes almost all of its revenue from building a vast, constantly updated database of netizens that it then sells access to, is upset that iOS 14, due out next month, will require apps to ask users for permission before Facebook grabs data from their phones.

“This is not a change we want to make, but unfortunately Apple’s updates to iOS14 have forced this decision,” the behemoth bemoans before thinking the unthinkable: that it may have to end its most intrusive analytics engine for iPhone and iPad users.

“We know this may severely impact publishers’ ability to monetize through Audience Network on iOS 14, and, despite our best efforts, may render Audience Network so ineffective on iOS 14 that it may not make sense to offer it on iOS 14 in the future.”

Amazingly, despite Facebook pointing out to Apple that it is tearing away people’s right to have their privacy invaded in order to receive ads for products they might want, Cupertino continues to push ahead anyway.

The result is potentially horrifying. “While it’s difficult to quantify the impact to publishers and developers at this point with so many unknowns, in testing we’ve seen more than a 50 per cent drop in Audience Network publisher revenue when personalization was removed from mobile app ad install campaigns,” Facebook warns.

Kieran McCarthy, you San Francisco savage. I love you.

Seriously, though, the fact that Apple is trying to mobilize public sentiment against Apple for blocking their own attempts to violate users' privacy is about as fucking rich as it gets. Epic, at least, have adoring Fortnite fans to mobilize; nobody is going to ghost Apple for protecting them from Facebook's intrusive data collection. 

And it's not like Facebook can leverage antitrust sentiment against Apple, either, since Facebook are also in Congress' crosshairs. Especially not in a week when Facebook just announced that Oculus users will need to login with Facebook accounts or lose their access to the games they'd bought for the platform, specifically on the strength of Facebook's promise to not do that. I mean... for fuck's sake, Zuck, what are you thinking?

I don't really have anything else to add, here; this whole post was basically written because McCarthy's piece was too juicy not to share. The whole piece goes on in this same sarcastic vein another couple of hundred words, and is totally worth reading, so go give them the click.

And fuck Facebook.

In case you needed one, here's another reason not to buy an Oculus VR headset

 

As reported by The Verge:

Oculus will soon require all of its virtual reality headset users to sign up with a Facebook account. [...]

Starting later this year, you’ll only be able to sign up for an Oculus account through Facebook. If you already have an account, you’ll be prompted to permanently merge your account. If you don’t, you’ll be able to use the headset normally until 2023, at which point official support will end. [...]

Facebook also says that all future unreleased Oculus devices will require a Facebook login, even if you’ve got a separate account already.

Yay?

If you're wondering why Facebook would possibly want to add even more barriers to entry in the way of VR adoption, in spite of the fact that almost nobody has a VR headset or cares about VR, the answer appears to be

a) consolidating Facebook’s management of its platforms, and

b) slightly simplifying the launch of Horizon, the social VR world that Facebook announced last year.

Of course, Facebook's disastrous record on privacy and data security makes 'a' problematic right out of the gate, and 'b' is only helpful is people care about Horizon... which is so thoroughly not a thing that even I hadn't heard about it, and I've been following this shit.

GG, Facebook! Well played. With most of your customers having bought those headsets only because they could also use them with Steam, you've now spiked your own sales, and probably the overall sales of VR headsets, for no other reason than sheer, monopolistic territoriality.

This week in Facebook: Yes, it gets worse edition

Seeing this headline on the same day that I posted about how Facebook isn't serious about reforming itself feels a bit like kismet... but, for the record, I'd rather have been wrong.

As reported by VICE:

Facebook Just Failed Its First Ever Civil Rights Audit

The auditors warned that Facebook's failures to address misinformation will have "direct and consequential implications" for the 2020 election.

Facebook’s repeated failures to address the rampant hate speech and misinformation on its platform have left the 2020 presidential election wide open to interference by President Donald Trump, according to a scathing new report.

A 100-page civil rights audit published Wednesday morning lays bare Facebook’s failings, and the auditors conclude that Facebook’s failure “to grasp the urgency” of the situation will have “direct and consequential implications“ on the U.S. presidential elections in November.

Yes, dear reader, there are indeed times that I hate being right all the damn time. And yes, this is one of them.

The whole piece gives a lot more detail, and is definitely worth a read, so go read it over there, and give these actual journalists some clicks. And then delete Facebook.

This week in Facebook: Victory! Kinda...

After finding himself and his company on the wrong side of history for most of a week which had fairly reeked of historical import, Mark Zuckerberg has finally had a moment of clarity. As reported by HuffPost:

It turns out protests work.

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced Friday that the company will conduct a review of the policy he cited when allowing President Donald Trump’s violence-inciting post to remain up on the site.

“We’re going to review our policies allowing discussion and threats of state use of force to see if there are any amendments we should adopt,” Zuckerberg wrote in a lengthy statement days after his employees staged a virtual walkout in protest of his response to Trump’s post.

Huzzah! It only took his own employees walking out on him, and a flurry of high-profile resignations at Facebook, for Zuckerberg to see the light see the need to adopt a more conciliatory tone.

This week in Facebook: It seems that "Criticism" was putting it mildly

It seems like just yesterday that I was blogging about Facebook's nascent culture, doesn't it? Probably because it was yesterday: specifically, yesterday morning.

By yesterday afternoon, the story had already evolved, as reported by The Huffington Post:

Facebook employees staged a “virtual walkout” Monday in protest of the social media company’s failure to address President Donald Trump’s use of its platform to spread incendiary content.

It’s unclear how many of the company’s 48,000 global employees are participating in the walkout by taking the day off. Many of Facebook’s employees were already working from home due to the COVID-19 pandemic.

A number of the virtual protesters said they planned to use their time to attend the physical demonstrations against police brutality around the country.

Wow. Just... wow.

Again, I have to emphasize just how much of a culture shift this represents. A year and half ago, Facebook's rank and file were talkingshop using burner phones to avoid having managers overhear, and complaining about the unfairness of Facebook's media coverage. Yesterday, they staged a walkout to protest Facebook itself.

This week in Facebook: Employees, including at least 3 senior managers, go public with criticism of Zuckerberg

This probably makes for some awkward water cooler conversations.

As reported by Reuters, via CBC News:

Facebook employees critical of CEO Mark Zuckerberg's decision not to act on U.S. President Donald Trump's inflammatory comments about protests across the United States went public on Twitter, praising the rival social media firm for acting and rebuking their own employer.

Many tech workers at companies including Facebook, Google and Amazon have actively pursued issues of social justice in recent years, urging their employers to take action and change policies.

Even so, the weekend criticism marked a rare case of high-level employees publicly taking their chief executive to task, with at least three of the seven critical posts seen by Reuters coming from people who identified themselves as senior managers.

"Mark is wrong, and I will endeavour in the loudest possible way to change his mind," wrote Ryan Freitas, whose Twitter account identifies him as director of product design for Facebook's News Feed. He added he had mobilized, "50+ likeminded folks" to lobby for internal change.

This marks a shift in corporate culture for Facebook. When last we'd heard, Facebook employees were using burner phones to talk about the company because they feared what fallout might come if they spoke out openly... while simultaneously complaining about the unfairness of the media coverage of the company.

That was December of 2018; now, just a year and a half later, their senior managers are openly talking about Mark Zuckerberg being "wrong" about Facebook's ethical obligations, and Facebookers themselves are speaking out on Twitter. That's a significant culture shift of the kind that often never happens at any company of any size, absent some sort of company-wide restructuring.

Does this signify a shift in the company more broadly? Google's rank-and-file have successfully forced senior management to change course on ethically dubious initiatives; if Facebook' rank and file are going to embrace that sort of "ethical tech" mindset, then it could well lead to Facebook becoming a force for much less evil in the world.

If that happens, then I'll take it. Baby steps, people, baby steps.

This week in Facebook

It's been a while since last posted one of these.

I mean, with all the COVID-19 chaos currently sweeping the world, it's just been hard to get all that worked up about Facebook's essentially evil nature. It helps that they've had very few major screwups, lately; there have been no more Cambridge Analytica-style scandals, no more Congressional testimony, no major developments on the anti-trust front... It had been so quiet, in fact, that Facebook's image looked like it might be about to recover from years of terrible PR.

And then the Wall Street Journal came along, and reminded us just how awful Facebook actually is:

A Facebook team had a blunt message for senior executives. The company's algorithms weren't bringing people together. They were driving people apart. "Our algorithms exploit the human brain's attraction to divisiveness," read a slide from a 2018 presentation. "If left unchecked," it warned, Facebook would feed users "more and more divisive content in an effort to gain user attention & increase time on the platform." That presentation went to the heart of a question dogging Facebook almost since its founding: Does its platform aggravate polarization and tribal behavior? The answer it found, in some cases, was yes.

This week in Facebook

It's been a while since I've done one of these, eh? Let's get right to it.

Do you remember when I said that Facebook's ongoing and ever-deepening scandals were going to end with someone from the firm doing jail time? Well, it looks like those wheels of justice may just be grinding slowly in the direction of no less a figure than Mark Zuckerberg, himself.

From arstechnica:

Mark Zuckerberg has "repeatedly lied to the American people about privacy," Sen. Ron Wyden (D-OR) said in a recent interview with the Willamette Week, a Portland alternative weekly newspaper. "I think he ought to be held personally accountable, which is everything from financial fines to—and let me underline this—the possibility of a prison term."

Zuckerberg, Wyden said, has "hurt a lot of people."

[...]

Technology companies, Wyden argued, have "done practically everything wrong since the 2016 election." He said he recently told technology companies: "If you don't get serious on moderation, you're going to have a lot of people coming after you."

Yikes.

This week in Facebook

Do you remember when I said that Facebook's ongoing and ever-deepening scandals were going to end with someone from the firm doing jail time? That outcome just became a lot more likely.

As reported by CNN Business:

Federal prosecutors are conducting a criminal investigation into Facebook's data sharing deals with a number of large technology companies, according to a new report in the New York Times.

As part of the investigation, a New York grand jury has subpoenaed two well-known smartphone makers for records related to the investigation, according to the report.

[...]

The grand jury inquiry was on behalf of the US attorney's office for the Eastern District of New York. When contacted by CNN Business, the Eastern District did not have a comment on the case.

Add this to Facebook's big outage of yesterday, and their incredibly stupid decision to block the campaign ad of Democratic Presidential candidate Elizabeth Warren, apparently because it talked bluntly about the need to break up companies like Facebook (way to prove her case, Zuck), and you end up with a week that a New York Times op-ed describes as "biblically bad."

The bare minimum, done under duress Facebook's anemic new pro-privacy measures don't impress me much

In a week which started with the UK Parliament condemning Facebook as "digital gangsters," it appears that Zuck & Co. have decided that they have to do something to turn back the tide of negative PR, and have chosen to make a couple of changes that, frankly, should have been made months ago.

First, as reported by TechCrunch, they're finally going to shut down their spyware-disguised-as-VPN "service," Onavo:

Facebook will end its unpaid market research programs and proactively take its Onavo VPN app off the Google Play store in the wake of backlash following TechCrunch’s investigation about Onavo code being used in a Facebook Research app the sucked up data about teens. The Onavo Protect app will eventually shut down, and will immediately cease pulling in data from users for market research though it will continue operating as a Virtual Private Network in the short-term to allow users to find a replacement.

Facebook has also ceased to recruit new users for the Facebook Research app that still runs on Android but was forced off of iOS by Apple after we reported on how it violated Apple’s Enterprise Certificate program for employee-only apps. Existing Facebook Research app studies will continue to run, though.

With the suspicions about tech giants and looming regulation leading to more intense scrutiny of privacy practices, Facebook has decided that giving users a utility like a VPN in exchange for quietly examining their app usage and mobile browsing data isn’t a wise strategy. Instead, it will focus on paid programs where users explicitly understand what privacy they’re giving up for direct financial compensation.

Second, as reported by TechZim, Facebook are also making changes to their app which will allow users to opt out of having Facebook collect their location data even when the app was not in use:

To address user concerns about the extent to which Facebook’s Android app can access location data, Facebook has now updated its location controls. The new privacy settings will enable Android users to opt out of location tracking when they aren’t actively using the app and have greater control over how much of their location data is saved by the social media giant. With a new option in place, Android users will now be able to decide whether or not they want Facebook to be aware of their location at all times.

Again, while both of these are good changes, they're also obvious changes which should have been implemented months ago. If they'd announced these changes immediately after these scandals broke, I'd have been impressed with the speed of their response, even if it took them a little while to actually patch the changes into their app; instead, I can only cynically assume that they've been keeping these in their back pocket, ready to deploy in a week where Facebook desperately needed some good PR.

"Digital gangsters"

Facebook's had a relatively quiet couple of weeks, with no major new scandals breaking and not much news on the investigation front. That period of calm appears to be drawing to a close, though, with the UK Parliament firing the starting gun on the race to end Facebook's current status quo, as reported by Gizmodo:

The UK Parliament’s Digital, Culture, Media and Sport Committee was spurred to launch an investigation of social media in 2017 following revelations regarding Russian election-meddling and later, the Cambridge Analytica scandal. The resulting 108-page report takes Facebook to task on numerous issues including violating its own privacy agreement with users and participating in anti-competitive practices. “Companies like Facebook should not be allowed to behave like ‘digital gangsters’ in the online world, considering themselves to be ahead of and beyond the law,” the committee wrote.

[...]

One of the report’s more interesting details is that it claims the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) shared the names of three “senior managers” at Facebook with the committee who allegedly were aware of the Cambridge Analytica data breach prior to the 2015 date that Facebook has claimed it first learned about the incident. The managers’ names were not revealed in the report but the committee found it unconscionable that the issue wasn’t brought to Zuckerberg’s attention until 2018. “The incident displays the fundamental weakness of Facebook in managing its responsibilities to the people whose data is used for its own commercial interests,” the committee wrote.

That sounds... potentially actionable. I wonder if the names have been withheld because active criminal investigations are underway?

This is how Facebook's week ends

It's been something of a roller-coaster week for Zuck & co. With the revelations of their creepy teen-surveillance Facebook Research app and their complicity in teen credit card fraud book-ending their strong financials and resulting share price gain, it was a little tough to tell whether this week should go on the books as a win or a loss for FB.

Well, it turns out the week wasn't over yet, and the latest report resolves that question in style: this week is definitely an "L" for Facebook.

From Gizmodo:

Amid the constant scandals swirling around social media giant Facebook and its questionable handling of user data, at least six state attorneys general have launched their own investigations of the company, Bloomberg reported this week.

Two distinct groups have formed, according to Bloomberg’s report: Pennsylvania and Illinois have joined Connecticut in an investigation of “existing allegations,” though the report does not mention what those are. Officials in New York, New Jersey, and Massachusetts, “which were already known to be probing Facebook, are seeking to uncover any potential unknown violations,” a source told the news agency.

Oh, my. That doesn't sound good.

Sheryl Sandberg's here to make it better worse

It looks like Facebook's creepy teen-data-collection app is not going away, mainly because Facebook can't help themselves. Sheryl Sandberg, who I once praised for having better communication skills than Mark Zuckerberg, only to be proven 100% wrong about that during the whole Definers Media business, has once again stepped forward to try to direct the narrative, and her defense of Facebook appears to be almost entirely composed of lies.

As reported by Gizmodo:

Chief operating officer Sheryl Sandberg’s defense? The teens “consented.”

“So I want to be clear what this is,” Sandberg told CNBC’s Julia Boorstin on Wednesday. “This is a Facebook Research app. It’s very clear to the people who participated. It’s completely opt-in. There is a rigorous consent flow and people are compensated. It’s a market research program.”

“Now, that said, we know we have work to do to make sure people’s data is protected,” Sandberg added, repeating a thoroughly unconvincing line that has been rolled out so many times amid Facebook’s constant scandals that it has barreled into self-satire territory. “It’s your information. You put it on Facebook, you need to know what is happening. In this case the people who chose to participate in this program did.”

“But we definitely have work to do and we’ve done it,” Sandberg said, just to hammer home that line.

Here's the problem, though: the teens that Facebook bribed into accepting this app on their phones almost certainly didn't know how comprehensive the data collection would be. They didn't know that Facebook was behind the app, either, since Facebook took pains to hide their involvement:

Facebook had users sideload the app and avoided submitting it through TestFlight, Apple’s beta testing system, which requires Apple review.

And Facebook didn't do anything to protect the privacy of these teens; Apple had already blocked the app before Facebook made a show of "voluntarily" taking it down.

U.S. lawmakers, naturally, are furious, as reported by The Verge:

Tuesday night, a TechCrunch investigation revealed that Facebook had been secretly paying teenagers to install a VPN that let the company see nearly everything they did on their phones. Today, lawmakers on both sides of the aisle are lashing out at the tech giant, raising new questions about how the company might fare in future privacy legislation.

“Wiretapping teens is not research, and it should never be permissible.” Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-CT) said in a statement. “Instead of learning its lesson when it was caught spying on consumers using the supposedly ‘private’ Onavo VPN app, Facebook rebranded the intrusive app and circumvented Apple’s attempts to protect iPhone users.”

Blumenthal said that he would be sending letters to Apple and Google to probe them on their involvement by hosting the apps.

Sen. Josh Hawley (R-MO) tweeted, “Wait a minute. Facebook PAID teenagers to install a surveillance device on their phones without telling them it gave Facebook power to spy on them? Some kids as young as 13. Are you serious?” This is Hawley’s first year serving in the Senate, and he has already positioned himself as a strong conservative voice on tech. At his first Judiciary hearing in January, Hawley lambasted President Trump’s attorney general nominee with questions regarding his stance on regulating Silicon Valley companies.

Yes, folks, that's bipartisan agreement that something needs to be done about Facebook, in a country where it took the two major political parties over a month to agree that government was something that needed to exist, and be paid for.

It's not all doom and gloom for Facebook, though. Advertisers have apparently decided that they don't care how terrible Facebook's image is, leading to a 61% jump in earnings despite the firm's bad press, and Facebook managed to gain a few users over the quarter, too. The result? A surge in their share price, of course, meaning that the company's new, more combative media strategy is likely to be the tone we hear from them going forwards. And why not? It's working for them, at least in the near term. And if there's one thing on which you can rely, it's that bad corporate behaviour that gets rewarded with increased share prices and executive bonuses is guaranteed to continue.

All in all, it looks like this year in Facebook is going to be an even bumpier ride than last year, with #deleteFacebook having stalled, Facebook's soul-less advertiser clients having returned, and Facebook's increasingly defiant tone in the face of a continued litany of scandal having finally got the attention of U.S. lawmakers, who are already proposing legislation to put Facebook back in its place.

Buckle up, sunshine. It gets even rougher from here.

This week in Facebook

Facebook's headlines this week are all about the children, and how Zuckerberg & co. are knowingly exploiting them.

First up, this piece from TechCrunch:

Desperate for data on its competitors, Facebook has been secretly paying people to install a “Facebook Research” VPN that lets the company suck in all of a user’s phone and web activity, similar to Facebook’s Onavo Protect app that Apple banned in June and that was removed in August. Facebook sidesteps the App Store and rewards teenagers and adults to download the Research app and give it root access to network traffic in what may be a violation of Apple policy so the social network can decrypt and analyze their phone activity, a TechCrunch investigation confirms. Facebook admitted to TechCrunch it was running the Research program to gather data on usage habits.

Since 2016, Facebook has been paying users ages 13 to 35 up to $20 per month plus referral fees to sell their privacy by installing the iOS or Android “Facebook Research” app. Facebook even asked users to screenshot their Amazon order history page. The program is administered through beta testing services Applause, BetaBound and uTest to cloak Facebook’s involvement, and is referred to in some documentation as “Project Atlas” — a fitting name for Facebook’s effort to map new trends and rivals around the globe.

Pro tip: If you're cloaking your involvement in a shady project because you know it's too shady to be publicly associated with... you should probably be rethinking the whole enterprise. Just saying.

Facebook's "Project Atlas" shenanigans should sound familiar: it wasn't that long ago that Facebook's Onavo app was removed from the iOS app store for violating Apple's terms of service. And the new app is pretty comprehensive, potentially allowing the collections of "photos/videos sent to others, emails, web searches, web browsing activity, and even ongoing location information by tapping into the feeds of any location tracking apps you may have installed." And, while Facebook apparently pulled an about-face at "at 11:20pm PT" (when TC's piece was updated), announced that FB was removing the app from Apple phones, they apparently have no plans yet to do the same on Android phones.

Also, it should be noted that most jurisdictions don't allow 13 year olds to sign legally binding contracts, which means that Facebook's use of just-barely-teens for this effort may be not-quite-legal. Which is when we get to the second piece of Facebook's sketchy and dodgy teen-involving bullshit, as reported by arstechnica:

Two Democratic senators have asked Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg to explain why the social network apparently "manipulated children into spending their parents' money without permission" while playing games on Facebook.

"A new report from the Center for Investigative Reporting shows that your company had a policy of willful blindness toward credit card charges by children—internally referred to as 'friendly fraud'—in order to boost revenue at the expense of parents," US Sens. Edward Markey (D-Mass.) and Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.) wrote in a letter to Zuckerberg today. "Notably, Facebook appears to have rejected a plan that would have effectively mitigated this risk and instead doubled down on maximizing revenue."

Because parents didn't know that children would be able to make purchases without additional verification, "many young users incurred several thousands of dollars in charges while playing games like Angry Birds, Petville, Wild Ones, and Barn Buddy," the senators' letter said.

What, did you think that Facebook had dodged responsibility for this one? Well, think again, Apple fan, because the Democratically-controlled U.S. House of Representatives aren't about to let this go, and their colleague in the U.S. Senate look to also be keen to get in on the regulating-of-Facebook action. I told you that Facebook's troubles were just getting started.

And so, with two different Facebook-exploits-teens stories in the headlines, we can now head into Wednesday... and the rest of the week. That's right, folks, Facebook's week isn't even over yet. Winning!

This week in Facebook

After starting the new year with a few largely scandal-free weeks, Mark Zuckerberg apparently decided that he was bored, or something, because the Facebook shit resumed flying fast and thick, and Gizmodo had pretty good coverage of it all.

First up: Mark Zuckerberg's thirsty op-ed, in which he opined that people didn't trust Facebook only because we don't understand them:

On Thursday, the Wall Street Journal published a 1,000-word screed by Mark Zuckerberg about the company’s data collecting practices titled “The Facts About Facebook.” In it, Zuckerberg makes noise about the company being about “people,” and insists—as he has been for the majority of his company’s 15-year history—that we should trust it. Zuckerberg appears to think the primary reason users have little faith in the company’s ability to responsibly or ethically handle their data is because of its targeted advertising practices, about which he writes: “This model can feel opaque, and we’re all distrustful of systems we don’t understand.” 

I guess the apology tour is over; Zuck is back to his normal, condescending self.

Gizmodo's Catie Keck goes on to list a few of the reasons why people who understand Facebook just fine also distrust Zuck & Co., starting with FB's lack of transparency, continuing on through Cambridge Analytica, and ending with their scraping and then sharing data about their users (and also about people who've never used Facebook themselves) with advertisers, and other low-lights:

In 2018, we learned that Facebook was data-sharing with other companies like Microsoft’s Bing, Spotify, Netflix, and others in exchange for more information about its users. There were also the revelations that Cambridge Analytica data-scraping was worse than we thought; that Facebook was sharing shadow contact information with advertisers; and that turning off Facebook location-sharing doesn’t stop it from tracking you. That’s obviously totally aside from the George Soros conspiracy theory fiasco; its mishandling of Myanmar genocide; and its standing as a hotbed for rampant misinformation.

As with his year-end Facebook post—which I’ll note here also largely ignored the tsunami of public relations problems the company faced last year—Zuckerberg appears to remain bafflingly optimistic about the function of his company. To be clear, this is the same founder of Facebook who once called users of his product “dumb fucks” for trusting him with their sensitive information.

Lots of links in the original article, if you missed some of those earlier "hits" when they happened.

So, not an auspicious beginning. Zuck wasn't done yet, though; not by a long shot.

Well beyond the realm of incompetence...

In case you were wondering... Facebook's day of bad news didn't only revolve around the consequences that they're now facing for their reckless disregard of their users' privacy. It also included new insight into that disregard for their users' privacy. As reported by The Guardian:

Facebook targets users with location-based adverts even if they block the company from accessing GPS on their phones, turn off location history in the app, hide their work location on their profile and never use the company’s “check in” feature, according to an investigation published this week.

There is no combination of settings that users can enable to prevent their location data from being used by advertisers to target them, according to the privacy researcher Aleksandra Korolova. “Taken together,” Korolova says, “Facebook creates an illusion of control rather than giving actual control over location-related ad targeting, which can lead to real harm.”

Facebook users can control to an extent how much information they give the company about their location. [...] But while users can decide to give more information to Facebook, Korolova revealed they cannot decide to stop the social network knowing where they are altogether nor can they stop it selling the ability to advertise based on that knowledge.

They say that you should hesitate to ascribe to malice that which can adequately be explained by incompetence, but there is no incompetence surrounding this latest revelation: Facebook themselves straight-up admit that they use "IP and other information such as check-ins and current city from your profile" to built these shadow profiles of users' location data, even after those users refused to grant Facebook permission to build a profile of their location data. This is clearly malicious. I've said it before, and I'll say it again: Google does not do this. Microsoft does not do this; Apple and Amazon do not do this. There is no "all sides" argument to be made by WIRED magazine, or any of Facebook's other Definers Media-fueled defenders.

Only Facebook is this shady. Facebook is the problem, here.

To say that this most likely contravenes multiple provisions of the GDPR would be something of an understatement; whether U.S. laws currently prohibit this sort of "shadow profiling" is anyone's guess, although I'm sure the new U.S. Congress will be looking into that question, among others. If you're waiting for government regulators to get a handle on the full breadth and depth of Facebook's scumminess, though... you should probably stop waiting, and just delete Facebook, already.

Facebook's very bad year gets even worse

It turns out that Facebook couldn't even make it through one more day before getting hit with more bad news. This time, though, it's not news of their incompetence, or their outright malice, that's wrecking their week; rather, it's news of actual consequences for Facebook. Finally.

As reported by The Washington Post:

Nine months after a whistleblower revealed Facebook had allowed outsiders to improperly access personal information about millions of its users, the social media giant faced its first major rebuke from regulators in the United States -- a lawsuit filed by the attorney general of the District of Columbia.

The lawsuit from Karl Racine on Wednesday targeted Facebook mainly for its entanglement with Cambridge Analytica, a political consultancy that harvested names, “likes” and other data from the social site without users’ permission. The incident, which affected more than 87 million users beginning in 2014, came to light this March, sparking investigations around the world.

The opening salvo from the D.C. attorney general ended a protracted silence on the part of many U.S. regulators, who have faced immense pressure -- from members of Congress and average web users -- to discipline Facebook for what many see as a reckless disregard for online privacy. Some of Silicon Valley’s toughest critics have urged the government to slap Facebook with severe fines and other penalties that might force it to rethink a business model that monetizes the most intimate details of consumers’ lives.

“It’s about time,” said Christopher Wylie, who exposed the Cambridge Analytica controversy through reports in several news organizations.

[...]

The D.C. case threatens to develop into an even worse headache for Facebook. Racine told reporters that his office has “had discussions with a number of other states that are similarly interested in protecting the data and personal information of their consumers,” though he cautioned there is no formal agreement for them to proceed jointly. And the attorney general’s aides said they could add additional charges to their lawsuit as other details about Facebook’s privacy lapses become public.

Hello, again, Christopher Wylie! I'd honestly forgotten that he even existed. But I digress...