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

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.

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...

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.

Fucking Facebook...

As someone who's never installed a Facebook app, I'd totally missed this when it first surfaced back in March, and I don't recall seeing it make headlines either. It should have. As reported by The Verge:

In March, many Android users were shocked to discover that Facebook had been collecting a record of their call and SMS history, as revealed by the company’s data download tool. [...] According to [internal emails released by the UK Parliament], developers knew the data was sensitive, but they still pushed to collect it as a way of expanding Facebook’s reach. [...] Notably, the project manager recognized it as “a pretty high-risk thing to do from a PR perspective,” but that risk seems to have been overwhelmed by the potential user growth.

[...]

Initially, the feature was intended to require users to opt in, typically through an in-app pop-up dialog box. But as developers looked for ways to get users signed up, it became clear that Android’s data permissions could be manipulated to automatically enroll users if the new feature was deployed in a certain way. [...] The group developing the feature seems to see the Android permissions screen as a point of unnecessary friction, to be avoided if possible. When testing revealed that call logs could be collected without a permissions dialog, that option seems to have been obviously preferable to developers.

Yes, that's Facebook, bypassing Android's privacy controls to access data that they knew damn well they had no right to, without bothering to ask permission from anybody at all... because GREED.

Stop me if you've heard this one...

Under pressure over the NY Times' bombshell story detailing Facebook's own campaign of anti-Semitic disinformation which they pursued in order to deflect criticism over the Cambridge Analytica scandal, Mark Zuckerberg offered a truly defense in response. In essence, he claimed:

1. the everybody knew that Facebook had employed Definers Media (i.e. nothing to see here);
2. that he himself didn't know that Facebook was employing Definers (i.e. it wasn't me);
3. that an un-named comms staffer had actually decided key details of Facebook's damage-control/PR strategy, apparently without anyone signing off on it (this, after testifying before Congress about how he "took full responsibility for" exactly this sort of decision-making at Facebook); and
4. that Facebook had now cut ties with Definers, literally yesterday (i.e. now that we all know about their shady business, they'd like to be seen doing a right thing).

As reported by Gizmodo:

Today, Facebook set up a press conference addressing a bombshell report from The New York Times that alleged, among other things, that the company contracted a Republican opposition research firm called Definers to run interference on the company’s image, a job which reportedly included leaning on George Soros conspiracy theories.

On the call, Mark Zuckerberg claimed he only found out the group was working for Facebook yesterday—which would mean the CEO learned about his company’s dealings well after most reporters.

Facebook ended its relationship with Definers yesterday, following backlash from the public as well as from the president of the Open Societies Foundation: one of the groups run by Soros, who has been a frequent target of anti-semitic conspiracy theories. In the wake of that abrupt dismissal, Facebook published a rebuttal which included the following statement:

Our relationship with Definers was well known by the media – not least because they have on several occasions sent out invitations to hundreds of journalists about important press calls on our behalf.

“Me personally, I didn’t know we were working with them,” Zuckerberg said during today’s Q&A. [...] Who would have known or approved of such a relationship? Zuckerberg, who previously stated that personnel matters are outside the purview of public disclosure, pinned the blame on “someone on our comms team.”

At this point, I can't help but wonder if anyone in Facebook's senior leadership had any idea what ethics even are. They've certainly behaved with reckless disregard for the truth, and utter contempt for the consequences of their decisions, with such consistency and for so long that I can no longer believe anything that they say without supporting documentation. Zuckerberg, personally, has done almost nothing but hide the truth and deflect criticism, all while espousing his own commitment to transparency, love of facts, and personal qualities of responsible leadership. The extent of the cynical hypocrisy on display here is simply breathtaking.

And I'm far from being the only person who's not buying it anymore.

Irony, thy name is Zuckerberg

Clearly, Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg did not know that the NY Times' blockbuster report detailing his own company's anti-Semitic fake news campaign was in the works when he made this decision. As reported by c|net:

Mark Zuckerberg is "not able" to attend a joint disinformation hearing in London, Facebook says, despite calls from politicians from five countries.

The Facebook CEO isn't giving in to pressure to provide testimony on Nov. 27, even after Argentina, Australia and Ireland added their voices to those of the UK and Canada last week.

In a letter to the UK's Digital, Culture, Media and Sport Committee, the company declined to say why Zuckerberg couldn't attend, but said it remains "happy to cooperate" with the inquiry. The letter also laid out some of the efforts Facebook has made over the last year in areas like fighting fake news and striving for transparency in political ads.

Damian Collins, chair of the committee, is leading the charge and noted that the social network's response is "hugely disappointing."

"The fact that he has continually declined to give evidence, not just to my committee, but now to an unprecedented international grand committee, makes him look like he's got something to hide," he said in an emailed statement."

It turns out Facebook actually did have something to hide: the fact that they're paying for exactly the brand of fake news that Zuckerberg claims to be fighting. How much longer he'll be able to keep dodging questions about his company's activities, while proclaiming his happiness to cooperate, remains to be seen, but I have a feeling it won't be too much longer.

#FacebookIsTheProblem
#FuckFacebook
#deleteFacebook

This week in Facebook

It's shaping up to be another bad week for Mark Zuckerberg.

The NY Times have published a blockbuster piece, reporting that Facebook were not only fighting the spread of fake news on their service, but actually spreading some fake news of their own: in particular, to paint their wave of post-Cambridge Analytica negative PR as some sort of George Soros-funded anti-Facebook conspiracy.

[As] evidence accumulated that Facebook’s power could also be exploited to disrupt elections, broadcast viral propaganda and inspire deadly campaigns of hate around the globe, Mr. Zuckerberg and Ms. Sandberg stumbled. Bent on growth, the pair ignored warning signs and then sought to conceal them from public view. At critical moments over the last three years, they were distracted by personal projects, and passed off security and policy decisions to subordinates, according to current and former executives.

When Facebook users learned last spring that the company had compromised their privacy in its rush to expand, allowing access to the personal information of tens of millions of people to a political data firm linked to President Trump, Facebook sought to deflect blame and mask the extent of the problem.

And when that failed — as the company’s stock price plummeted and it faced a consumer backlash — Facebook went on the attack.

While Mr. Zuckerberg has conducted a public apology tour in the last year, Ms. Sandberg has overseen an aggressive lobbying campaign to combat Facebook’s critics, shift public anger toward rival companies and ward off damaging regulation. Facebook employed a Republican opposition-research firm to discredit activist protesters, in part by linking them to the liberal financier George Soros. It also tapped its business relationships, lobbying a Jewish civil rights group to cast some criticism of the company as anti-Semitic.

This means that Facebook funded anti-Semitic propaganda for no other reason that petty material self-interest. Which means that Facebook now have real blood on their hands, after a wave of anti-Semitic social media content on their own site helped inspire one of the worst incidents of anti-Semitic mass murder in U.S. history. And Jews weren't the only targets of Facebook's fake news campaign.

In the midst of another huge data breach, Facebook adopts Comcast-style loss prevention strategy

I am surprised only that people are surprised. From Gizmodo:

Facebook is currently dealing with the fallout of a massive attack that compromised site security and allowed hackers to seize the access tokens of roughly 50 million accounts, potentially giving them full control of both the accounts and linked apps. It is still sorting out what user data might have been stolen. Amid all this, Facebook is also extending its grip on how long it can keep account deletion requests in hiatus from two weeks to a month, the Verge reported on Wednesday.

Here’s what that means. When a user tries to delete their Facebook, the site holds on to all of their data for a period of time in case they decide they want to come back. That used to be 14 days, and now it is conveniently a month, right around the same time users might be getting antsy that hackers were able to get past the site’s core security measures.

[...]

It’s not clear when the decision was made, or whether it predates September 25th, when the company says it became aware of the hack. (Gizmodo has reached out for comment, and we’ll update this post if we hear back.) Even if the updated data retention policies have nothing to do with the security incident, that still doubles the amount of time Facebook is able to hold user data after they decide they want out—essentially making it harder for users to manage their own privacy and security so that the company can try to retain them at a time growth is stalling.

Le sigh.

The depths of Facebook's asshole-ery really should not be at all surprising, at this point. Holding your delete request in a "hiatus" state at all is already bullshit; I can understand that it might take some time to effect the deletion, and that there might be other deletion requests in the queue ahead of a newly submitted one, but that was never why it took two weeks for Facebook to complete a deletion, something which they have now confirmed. This is a loss prevention strategy, plain and simple; it is Facebook simply not doing what you've clearly told them to do, simply because there's benefit to them in stalling as long as possible.

This week in Facebook

One of the more perplexing things about Facebook's ongoing privacy fiasco was its lack of impact on FB's share price. No matter how bad things looked on the PR front, no matter how many class action lawsuits were working their way through courts in various jurisdictions, no matter how many different jurisdictions announced new or intensified investigations (or fines), FB's stock price just kept on rising, and Mark Zuckerberg's personal net worth along with it. It was Bizarro World's version of the Invisible Hand, in which markets simply didn't care about the obviously looming costs of FB's mounting woes.

Well, today, that finally came to an end, mainly because Facebook themselves finally decided that SEC rules required them to throw some cold water on it all. As reported by Reuters, via EWN:

Facebook Inc’s shares lost as much as a quarter of their value on Wednesday after executives said that profit margins would plummet for several years due to the costs of improving privacy safeguards and slowing usage in the biggest advertising markets.

The second-quarter results were the first sign that a new European privacy law and a succession of privacy scandals involving Cambridge Analytica and other app developers have bit into Facebook’s business. The company further warned that the toll would not be offset by revenue growth from emerging markets and Facebook’s Instagram app, which has been more immune from privacy concerns.

Facebook's fortunes shifted in under two hours as the company first reported revenue and user growth that missed expectations and then issued warnings about future growth and expenses.

[...]

The plummeting stock price wiped out as much as $150 billion in market capitalisation and erased the stock’s gains since April when Facebook announced a surprisingly strong 63 percent rise in profit and an increase in users.

It's. About. Damn. Time.

I do feel some sympathy for people whose pension plan managers have been buying Facebook stock over the last year, apparently oblivious to the gathering storm.  They're taking a bath on FB stock right now, due entirely to decisions they had no hand in making, which sucks. For the greedy speculators, though, who have been watching all of FB's floundering for months and still managed to give zero fucks about FB's issues as long as they could convince themselves that profits (and dividends) would continue to flow? They can fuck themselves.

Facebook are gigantic, with enormous cash reserves; they can afford to lose money for a while yet, before it really starts to hurt them. But with their share price finally dropping, raising the possibility of maybe some pressure, finally, from shareholders, we may be about to see Facebook start tackling the root causes of their problems, i.e. their corporate culture, rather than just paying PR lip service to the idea of reforming themselves (but no regulations, please).

Here's hoping, anyway.

Facebook's lies revealed... again

Remember when Mark Zuckerberg was asked, point-blank, if he'd implement GDPR-calibre provisions across all of Facebook, and he replied with some word salad that was meant to sound like an affirmative reply... but only after he'd first said that they wouldn't? It looks like his first answer to that question, i.e. that Facebook had no immediate plans to do this, was actually the truth.

From The Hill:

Facebook is moving to exempt 1.5 billion users in Africa, Asia, Australia and Latin America from its terms of service as dictated under a new European Union regulation, according to a Reuters report.

The move comes weeks before the E.U.'s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) is set to take effect. The rule addresses the protection of personal data shared outside the E.U.

By exempting so many of its members from the new regulation, Facebook would limit its liability under the new rule, which allows for fines of up to 4 percent of a company's global annual revenue for violations.

For Facebook, that could mean billions of dollars in potential fines, according to Reuters.
According to Reuters, the exemption would affect more than 70 percent of Facebook users worldwide. As of December, the social media platform had 239 million members in the U.S. and Canada, 370 million in Europe and 1.52 billion users in other parts of the world.

So, if you live in the EU, you'll be covered by GDPR, and if you live in the USA, you'll be covered by Facebook's GDPR-lite privacy policy, but if you're of the other 70% of Facebook's users, then you're fucked. And they didn't buy you a drink, first.

The way Facebook are implementing GDPR (in those few places where they are doing so) is drawing heavy criticism as well, as reported by TechCrunch:

In simple terms, seeking consent from users in a way that’s not fair because it’s manipulative means consent is not being freely given. Under GDPR, it won’t be consent at all. So Facebook appears to be seeing how close to the wind it can fly to test how regulators will respond.

Safe to say, EU lawmakers and NGOs are watching.

[...]

Data protection experts who TechCrunch spoke to suggest Facebook is failing to comply with, not just the spirit, but the letter of the law here. Some were exceeding blunt on this point.

“I am less impressed,” said law professor Mireille Hildebrandt discussing how Facebook is railroading users into consenting to its targeted advertising. “It seems they have announced that they will still require consent for targeted advertising and refuse the service if one does not agree. This violates [GDPR] art. 7.4 jo recital 43. So, yes, they will be taken to court.”

The best worst part of all this? Even the parts of the world that are getting GDPR coverage, are only going to be covered because Facebook has their international headquarters in Ireland... for tax reasons. That's right, it's only their shady tax evasion policy that's left Facebook exposed to GDPR in the first place. If not for that, they wouldn't be covering anybody.

Perhaps that's why people like Richard Stallman are speaking out for stronger regulation, as in his recent interview with New York Magazine:

We need a law. Fuck them — there’s no reason we should let them exist if the price is knowing everything about us. Let them disappear. They’re not important — our human rights are important. No company is so important that its existence justifies setting up a police state. And a police state is what we’re heading toward.

I can only agree. Fuck them. Fuck Mark Zuckerberg and his lying, android-like face, and fuck the horse he rode in on. Fuck Facebook.

#FacebookIsTheProblem
#DeleteFacebook