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 […]

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

Facebook refuses to disclose “chuck Chequers” Brexit advertiser to UK parliament

Facebook has refused to provide the British parliament with the names of individuals behind a shadowy network backing an extreme ‘no deal’ Brexit outcome over a government-negotiated compromise. Since the June 2016 EU referendum vote, politics in the UK has been consumed by the question of how to implement a close vote to leave. And […]

View More Facebook refuses to disclose “chuck Chequers” Brexit advertiser to UK parliament

Seized cache of Facebook docs raise competition and consent questions

A UK parliamentary committee has published the cache of Facebook documents it dramatically seized last week. The documents were obtained by a legal discovery process by a startup that’s suing the social network in a California court in a case related to Facebook changing data access permissions back in 2014/15. The court had sealed the documents […]

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“The problem is Facebook,” lawmakers from nine countries tell Zuckerberg’s accountability stand-in

A grand committee of international parliamentarians empty-chaired Mark Zuckerberg at a hearing earlier today, after the Facebook founder snubbed repeat invitations to face questions about malicious, abusive and improper uses of his social media platform — including the democracy-denting impacts of so-called ‘fake news’. The UK’s DCMS committee has been leading the charge to hold Facebook […]

View More “The problem is Facebook,” lawmakers from nine countries tell Zuckerberg’s accountability stand-in

UK parliament seizes cache of internal Facebook documents to further privacy probe

Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg may yet regret underestimating a UK parliamentary committee that’s been investigating the democracy-denting impact of online disinformation for the best part of this year — and whose repeat requests for facetime he’s just as repeatedly snubbed. In the latest high gear change, reported in yesterday’s Observer, the committee has used parliamentary powers […]

View More UK parliament seizes cache of internal Facebook documents to further privacy probe

Zuckerberg rejects facetime call for answers from five parliaments

Facebook has declined once again to send its CEO to the UK parliament — this time turning down an invitation to face questions from a grand committee comprised of representatives from five international parliaments. MPs from Argentina, Australia, Canada, Ireland and the UK have joined forces to try to pile pressure on the company’s founder, Mark […]

View More Zuckerberg rejects facetime call for answers from five parliaments

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 […]

View More Zuckerberg gets joint summons from UK and Canadian parliaments

Fake news ‘threat to democracy’ report gets back-burner response from UK gov’t

The UK government has rejected a parliamentary committee’s call for a levy on social media firms to fund digital literacy lessons to combat the impact of disinformation online. The recommendation of a levy on social media platforms was made by the Digital, Culture, Media and Sport committee three months ago, in a preliminary report following […]

View More Fake news ‘threat to democracy’ report gets back-burner response from UK gov’t

Zuckerberg must face public scrutiny over latest data breach, say UK MPs

UK members of parliament have once again called for Facebook’s founder, Mark Zuckerberg, to travel to the country to face questions about how his business operates. They’re renewing calls for facetime with the Facebook CEO in light of the massive data breach it disclosed on Friday — which the company said could affect as many as […]

View More Zuckerberg must face public scrutiny over latest data breach, say UK MPs

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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One more thing re: “privacy concerns” raised by the DCMS fake new report…

A meaty first report by the UK parliamentary committee that’s been running an inquiry into online disinformation since fall 2017, including scrutinizing how people’s personal information was harvested from social media services like Facebook and used for voter profiling and the targeting of campaign ads — and whose chair, Damian Collins — is a member […]

View More One more thing re: “privacy concerns” raised by the DCMS fake new report…

Facebook finally hands over leave campaign Brexit ads

The UK parliament has provided another telling glimpse behind the curtain of Facebook’s unregulated ad platform by publishing data on scores of pro-Brexit adverts which it distributed to UK voters during the 2016 referendum on European Union membership. The ads were run on behalf of several vote leave campaigns who paid a third company to […]

View More Facebook finally hands over leave campaign Brexit ads