Zuckerberg makes case for privacy regs with teeth — by failing to remember non-existent FTC fine

Chalk up a sharp political point in support for privacy legislation with actual teeth: In today’s testimony in front of the House Energy & Commerce committee, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg was asked about the outcomes of a string of legal actions against the company — most of which he claimed not be aware of. One which he […]

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Zuckerberg urges privacy carve outs to compete with China

Facebook’s founder said last month that the company is open to being regulated. But today he got asked by the US senate what sort of legislative changes he would (and wouldn’t) like to see as a fix for the problems that the Cambridge Analytica data scandal has revealed. Zuckerberg’s response on this — and on […]

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A brief history of Facebook’s privacy hostility ahead of Zuckerberg’s testimony

The Facebook founder will be questioned by the Senate Judiciary and Senate Commerce Committees later today — in a session entitled “Facebook, Social Media Privacy, and the Use and Abuse of Data.” Mark Zuckerberg is also due to testify before Congress on Wednesday — to be asked about the company’s use and protection of user […]

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Facebook urged to make GDPR its “baseline standard” globally

Facebook is facing calls from consumer groups to make the European Union’s incoming GDPR data protection framework the “baseline standard for all Facebook services”. The update to the bloc’s data protection framework is intended to strengthen consumers’ control over how their personal data is used by bolstering transparency and consent requirements, and beefing up penalties […]

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Facebook, AggregateIQ now being jointly probed by Canada, B.C. data watchdogs

Privacy watchdogs in Canada and British Columbia are combining existing investigations into Facebook and AggregateIQ. The latter being a Victoria-based ad targeting tech company that has been linked to Cambridge Analytica, the political consultancy at the center of the Facebook data misuse storm. Facebook responds to data misuse CA whistleblower Chris Wylie — who last […]

View More Facebook, AggregateIQ now being jointly probed by Canada, B.C. data watchdogs

Facebook to exclude US users from some privacy enhancements

There’s no way to sugarcoat this message: Facebook’s founder Mark Zuckerberg believes North America users of his platform deserve a lower data protection standard than people everywhere else in the world. In a phone interview with Reuters yesterday Mark Zuckerberg declined to commit to universally implementing changes to the platform that are necessary to comply with […]

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Grindr hit with privacy complaint in Europe over sharing user data

The Norwegian Consumer Council has filed a privacy complaint about Grindr, arguing it’s in breach of national and European data protection laws after it emerged the dating app has been sharing personal information about its users with third parties. As we reported earlier, Norwegian research outfit SINTEF analyzed the app’s traffic and found that — if set — […]

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Facebook blames bug for saving users’ deleted videos

Facebook has been caught archiving videos users thought they had deleted. The New York Magazine flagged the problem to the company last week, after a user downloaded their Facebook archive and was surprised to discover multiple takes of a video they had thought had been discarded at the time the recording was made, years earlier. Facebook has […]

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Here’s Cambridge Analytica’s plan for voters’ Facebook data

More details have emerged about how Facebook data on millions of US voters was handled after it was obtained in 2014 by UK political consultancy Cambridge Analytica for building psychographic profiles of Americans to target election messages for the Trump campaign. The dataset — of more than 50M Facebook users — is at the center […]

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Facebook was warned about app permissions in 2011

Who’s to blame for the leaking of 50 million Facebook users’ data? Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg broke several days of silence in the face of a raging privacy storm to go on CNN this week to say he was sorry. He also admitted the company had made mistakes; said it had breached the […]

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Facebook hit with shareholder lawsuits over data misuse crisis

The lawsuits are piling up against Facebook in the wake of the Cambridge Analytica data misuse and political ad targeting scandal. According to SF Gate the company has been hit with four suits in federal courts so far this week following fresh revelations about how Facebook’s app permissions were abused to surreptitiously suck out vast amounts […]

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InfoSum’s first product touts decentralized big data insights

 Nick Halstead’s new startup, InfoSum, is launching its first product today — moving one step closer to his founding vision of a data platform that can help businesses and organizations unlock insights from big data silos without compromising user privacy, data security or data protection law. So a pretty high bar then. If the underlying tech lives up to the promises being made for… Read More

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