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Facebook is fighting a new controversy on both sides of the Atlantic while it claims to receive highly personal data from third-party applications.
The crowd of bad news around the company comes after its managing director, Mark Zuckerberg, was criticized for meeting with Culture Secretary Jeremy Wright after he refused to appear before an influential parliamentary committee in Westminster.
The meeting took place in the midst of speculation that the government could soon publish a white paper potentially paving the way for an independent regulator of social media.
But the Observer We were told that a conflict was about how the regulator should be financed. A proposal to hit social media companies with a levy has alarmed some people from the Department of Culture, Media, Sports and Digital (DCMS) who wish to encourage technology investment in the UK. Others think the tax should apply to more technology companies, including Amazon. It is also questionable whether the Media Regulatory Body, Ofcom, should oversee the new regulator or whether it should be independent.
On Friday, a the Wall Street newspaper The survey revealed that Facebook can receive information from many applications even if in some cases the user does not have a Facebook account. More than 70 popular applications tested by the Newspaper, he found at least 11 potentially sensitive information sent to Facebook.
These included monitoring the Flo period and ovulation, which would have been shared with Facebook when the users had their period or when they were trying to become pregnant. Facebook said that applications should tell users what information was shared and that they "forbid application developers to send sensitive data to us."
New York Governor Andrew Cuomo called on state departments and financial services to "immediately investigate" what he called a clear breach of consumer privacy. Last week, the DCMS committee of the UK parliament released a scathing report calling for stricter privacy rules for Facebook and other tech companies. Zuckerberg rejected the committee's requests to appear before her. But last week, he met Wright at his company's headquarters in Silicon Valley to discuss the fight against damaging online content.
"It is clear that the UK government wants to protect its citizens online and will put in place structures that no longer rely on self-regulation," Wright said.
But Labor MP Ian Lucas, a member of the committee, criticized the meeting. "Me too, I would like to meet Mark Zuckerberg, but not to chat – to ask real questions about all the issues we have raised," Lucas said. "We have a lot of questions. I recognize that Jeremy Wright has to go to the tech giants, but I think it's a question of tone.
"The thing about Jeremy Wright, is that he's not really going to say hoot to a goose."
Criticisms about Facebook's attitude toward the privacy of its users exploded a year ago as a result of revelations in the Observer Cambridge Analytica, a data mining company, accessed without consent the data of some 87 million of its users.
In the meantime, the documents posted online on Friday raised new questions about privacy. About 60 pages of unedited shows arising from a lawsuit between Facebook and Six4Three, an application developer, have been posted anonymously on the GitHub site.
In an email, the former vice president of Facebook, Michael Vernal, appeared to discuss a serious problem with a third-party application. Vernal apparently warned, "If Mark [Zuckerberg] had accidentally divulged his earnings in advance because a platform application had violated his privacy … literally, that would have been fatal for Login / Open Graph / etc. ", A reference to Facebook development applications.
Facebook responded in a statement: "Like the other documents that were selected and published in violation of a court decision last year, these, by design, tell an aspect of the story. History and omit an important context. "
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