Brandwatch turns its war-chest on acquiring market research startup Qriously

In the past few years it’s become increasingly evident that while social media was a fantastic new way to get into the minds of people and understand what they thought in order to sell them things, you couldn’t just rely on the blathering of millions of people. You also had to literally ask them questions. […]

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Facebook staff raised concerns about Cambridge Analytica in September 2015, per court filing

Further details have emerged about when and how much Facebook knew about data-scraping by the disgraced and now defunct Cambridge Analytica political data firm. Last year a major privacy scandal hit Facebook after it emerged CA had paid GSR, a developer with access to Facebook’s platform, to extract personal data on as many as 87M […]

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Twitter cracks down on API abuse, will charge B2B devs

To prevent its own Cambridge Analytica and make sure it’s getting paid for its data, Twitter will audit developers using its APIs. Starting June 19th, Twitter will require any app that calls a recent tweets from or mentions of a user more than 100,000 times per day to submit their app for review. If a […]

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Can predictive analytics be made safe for humans?

Massive-scale predictive analytics is a relatively new phenomenon, one that challenges both decades of law as well as consumer thinking about privacy. As a technology, it may well save thousands of lives in applications like predictive medicine, but if it isn’t used carefully, it may prevent thousands from getting loans, for instance, if an underwriting […]

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UK parliament calls for antitrust, data abuse probe of Facebook

A final report by a British parliamentary committee which spent months last year investigating online political disinformation makes very uncomfortable reading for Facebook — with the company singled out for “disingenuous” and “bad faith” responses to democratic concerns about the misuse of people’s data. In the report, published today, the committee has also called for […]

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Brexit backer’s insurance firm and leave campaign fined £120k by data watchdog

The UK’s data protection watchdog has issued fines against a pro-Brexit campaign, Leave.EU, and an insurance company owned by the largest individual donor to the leave cause, Arron Banks’ Eldon Insurance. The penalties have been handed down for what the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) dubs “serious breaches of electronic marketing laws” during the 2016 referendum on […]

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Despite ‘transparency’ claims, Facebook stops watchdogs from monitoring ads

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Facebook appears to be talking out of both sides of its mouth again.

On Monday, the nonprofit news organization ProPublica published a report stating that Facebook had intentionally disabled its ability to monitor political advertising on the platform — which doesn’t exactly sound like the transparency Mark Zuckerberg promised. 

ProPublica uses a plugin that allows it to see which ads a consenting user sees on Facebook. It also tells the organization how those users were targeted. For example, if you’re someone who told Facebook that you are “liberal,” you might see ads for liberal causes. But this sort of targeting can also get much, much more granular. Cambridge Analytica targeted people with political ads based on their denim preferences. Read more…

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Most Facebook users still in the dark about its creepy ad practices, Pew finds

A study by the Pew Research Center suggests most Facebook users are still in the dark about how the company tracks and profiles them for ad-targeting purposes. Pew found three-quarters (74%) of Facebook users did not know the social networking behemoth maintains a list of their interests and traits to target them with ads, only […]

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Cambridge Analytica’s parent pleads guilty to breaking UK data law

Cambridge Analytica’s parent company, SCL Elections, has been fined £15,000 in a UK court after pleading guilty to failing to comply with an enforcement notice issued by the national data protection watchdog, the Guardian reports. While the fine itself is a small and rather symbolic one, given the political data analytics firm went into administration last […]

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Mark Zuckerberg is “proud” of how Facebook handled its scandals this year

After the year Mark Zuckerberg’s had, you’d think he’d struggle to appear so chipper. “I’m proud of the progress we’ve made,” he said in an end-of-year note posted on his Facebook page for everyone to see. Acknowledging that the social network played its part in the spread of hate speech, election interference, and misinformation, Zuckerberg’s […]

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Washington, D.C., attorney general is suing Facebook over Cambridge Analytica scandal

D.C. prosecutors claim Facebook misled users when they were allowed to download a Cambridge Analytica produced app. Read more…More about Facebook, Mashable Video, Mark Zuckerberg, Washington Dc, and Cambridge Analytica

View More Washington, D.C., attorney general is suing Facebook over Cambridge Analytica scandal