Facebook’s election interference problem exponentially worse on eve of midterms, study suggests

An analysis of political advertisers running extensive campaigns on Facebook targeting users in the United States over the past six months has flagged a raft of fresh concerns about its efforts to tackle election interference — suggesting the social network’s self regulation is offering little more than a sham veneer of accountability. Dig down and […]

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Campaign tool supplied to UK’s governing party by Trump-Pence app dev quietly taken out of service — thanks to GDPR

An app that the UK’s governing party launched last year — for Conservative Party activists to gamify, ‘socialize’ and co-ordinate their campaigning activity — has been quietly pulled from app stores. Its vanishing was flagged to us earlier today, by Twitter user Sarah Parks, who noticed that, when loaded, the Campaigner app now displays a message informing users […]

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Zuckerberg gets joint summons from UK and Canadian parliaments

Two separate parliamentary committees, in the UK and Canada, have issued an unprecedented international joint summons for Facebook’s CEO Mark Zuckerberg to appear before them. The committees are investigating the impact of online disinformation on democratic processes and want Zuckerberg to answer questions related to the Cambridge Analytica-Facebook user data misuse scandal, which both have been […]

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Europe’s parliament calls for full audit of Facebook in wake of breach scandal

The European Parliament has called for a full audit of Facebook following a string of data breach scandals —  including the Cambridge Analytica affair. MEPs are urging the company to allow European Union bodies to carry out a full audit to assess data protection and security of users’ personal data, following the scandal in which […]

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Facebook fined £500K for ‘serious breaches’ of data protection law

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Facebook has been fined half a million pounds by the UK’s data watchdog, the Information Commissioner’s Office. The ICO fined Facebook £500,000 ($645,175) for “serious breaches of the data protection law,” per the penalty notice. 

The figure — which is the maximum fine that the ICO is able to impose — is still rather paltry compared to Facebook’s net worth of £445bn. 

An investigation by the ICO revealed that between 2007 and 2014, Facebook “processed the personal information of users unfairly by allowing application developers access to their information without sufficiently clear and informed consent.” Facebook also allowed “access even if users had not downloaded the app but were simply ‘friends’ with people who had.”  Read more…

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UK watchdog hands Facebook maximum $500K fine over Cambridge Analytica data breach

The U.K. Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) has confirmed that it has hit Facebook with a maximum $500,000 ($645,000) fine around the way it mishandled user data following the Cambridge Analytica scandal earlier this year. The ICO announced its intention to hand Facebook the fine back in July and it said today that it had not changed […]

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Japan is the latest country to challenge Facebook to improve security

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The latest Facebook data breach is prompting scrutiny on the world stage.

On Monday, the Japanese government asked Facebook to be more proactive and transparent about protecting its users’ dataReuters learned of the request via a statement from Japan’s Personal Information Protection Commission.

Specifically, Japanese authorities want Facebook to increase monitoring of third party apps, tell users when there’s been any issue, and keep the government abreast of any changes to its security infrastructure. 

The letter is reportedly just a request. There is nothing legally binding or carrying any penalties within it. Read more…

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Facebook hires former UK Lib Dem leader, Nick Clegg, as global policy chief

Facebook has confirmed it has hired the former leader of the UK’s former third largest political party — Nick Clegg of the middle ground Liberal Democrats — to head up global policy and comms. The news was reported earlier by the Financial Times. Facebook hires Nick Clegg, the former UK deputy prime minister, to head […]

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Audit Facebook and overhaul competition law, say MEPs responding to breach scandals

After holding a series of hearings in the wake of the Facebook -Cambridge Analytica data misuse scandal this summer, and attending a meeting with Mark Zuckerberg himself in May, the European Union parliament’s civil liberties committee has called for an update to competition rules to reflect what it dubs “the digital reality”, urging EU institutions […]

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Facebook is weaponizing security to erode privacy

At a Senate hearing this week in which US lawmakers quizzed tech giants on how they should go about drawing up comprehensive Federal consumer privacy protection legislation, Apple’s VP of software technology described privacy as a “core value” for the company. “We want your device to know everything about you but we don’t think we should,” Bud […]

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Facebook expands bug bounty program to include third-party apps and websites

Facebook announced this morning it’s expanding its bug bounty program – which pays researchers who find security vulnerabilities within its platform – to now include issues found in third-party apps and websites. Specifically, Facebook says it will reward valid reports of vulnerabilities that relate to the improper exposure of Facebook user access tokens. Typically, when […]

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