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A Facebook initiative announced last year to generate "independent and credible research on the role of social media in elections" is weakening, BuzzFeed said this week, citing multiple sources familiar with the program. and its participants. According to former Facebook security chief, reporters who have covered the Cambridge Analytica scandal are at least partly responsible.
Alex Stamos, who was monitoring Facebook's security when the scandal first broke out last year, criticized BuzzFeed and "other media" for what he called "unbalanced reports." about privacy ", claiming that the media coverage of the many privacy breaches on Facebook had been directed from the beginning. hinder its ability to share data for legitimate research.
[See updates below for comments from Stamos, who also says this article is an “extremely unfair characterization” of his tweets and “Gizmodo at its finest.”]
"If the misuse of an API by an academic is considered the biggest scandal for privacy in the history of the Internet, how do you think companies will treat future academic research? "Thisisyourdigitallife", the app collected data from Facebook users, which were then acquired by Cambridge Analytica. (The story of BuzzFeed does not mention Cambridge Analytica once.)
The characterization of the scandal by Stamos as being "the misuse of an API by an academic" contradicts the fact that Facebook deliberately devised a system in which only one user was allowed to consent to the disclosure of data belonging to to thousands of other users. Thanks to Facebook, while only a few hundred thousand people downloaded Kogan's application, Cambridge Analytica was able to acquire data on some 86 million other people who never agreed to participate in Kogan's research.
This practice continued during Stamos' tenure on Facebook, as described in a New York Times article last year, in which Stamos fired on Friday, saying "this is completely false.[ed] This industry, which relies on internal documents generated in 2017, describes how Facebook has allowed companies such as Microsoft and Amazon to access the names and contact information of users' friends without their consent.
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This system, which generates $ 50 billion of business on Facebook, forces any user to "friend" another. There is simply no way to know which friends will agree to disclose their personal information. And it's an incentive for society not to make its data sharing practices too obvious. That's why its privacy settings do not reflect how they work. (As part of its recent $ 5 billion deal with the FTC, Facebook agreed to begin asking users for permission before sharing their data beyond what is specified in its privacy settings.)
According to Stamos, this is a "normal" practice in the industry and any attempt to highlight the finer details of Facebook's operations only serves to sensationalize its behavior. Facebook is now too afraid to transmit its data to give researchers a better insight into the impact of its platform on democratic elections around the world – what CEO Mark Zuckerberg called "crazy" after the 39, election of 2016 – and, according to Stamos, the media are to blame.
John Paczkowski, technical and professional editor of BuzzFeed, reacted to Stamos 'criticism by declaring "a decade of disregard for users' privacy and a profound lack of transparency as to the use of our personal data," citing , among others, Facebook's attempt to user data through the promotion of its product "Privacy", Onavo.
Onavo, a spyware pretending to be a virtual private network (VPN), was introduced to Facebook users as a way to "protect" their accounts. In reality, this allowed the company to access a wealth of private information – data that most VPNs are proud to not collect – including the daily use of the wifi and cellular data. The application also collected data on other applications running on the user's phone, for example Facebook's competitors such as Snapchat. Nevertheless, Facebook has introduced the application as a way for users to protect their personal information.
Onavo remains by far one of Facebook's most grotesque attempts to loot the data of its users for marketing purposes. It would have been ejected from the Apple App Store precisely on this basis almost exactly a year to the day.
While Stamos has retrospectively criticized Facebook's use of Onavo in the old daysIn particular, he was the company's most senior person in charge of security and compliance control when Facebook decided to start advertising for Onavo to users of the Facebook app. He was still working last year the day he left the company. However, he believes perhaps that is also the fault of BuzzFeed.
Update, 6pm: Stamos sent to Gizmodo the following:
I'm not sure it would be fair to say that I involve the media. I am happy [BuzzFeed’s Craig Silverman] wrote the text, because I really want SS1 to work and university research solutions based on differential privacy become the norm. The problem is that most of the media coverage reflects the broader societal problem: we do not know how much we want these societies to be open, nor how to define the term "public".
There has recently been a mini-scandal about comments taken away by a Mexican company to the public. [Facebook] pages. Twitter offers an API that does the same thing and no one smiles. As the WSJ pointed out, the FBI is trying to appeal to a company to do something that Facebook must try to prevent.
I think the coverage of data protection issues at Buzzfeed and elsewhere almost never talks about compromises.
Stamos continued:
"Yes, I think Onavo should not exist and that [Facebook] should not have bought them, "adding," I do not like Facebook for these other things "does not change the basic tradeoffs with SS1 and academic attempts to study what's happening on the biggest network in the world ".
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