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Facebook has been hit by another damning story about its treatment of user data on Tuesday. And that could have potential regulatory implications.
According to a report by Olivia Solon and Cyrus Farivar of NBC News, Facebook and its founder, Mark Zuckerberg, had considered selling user data to application developers even though it was publicly highlighted its efforts to protect the privacy of users:
But the documents show that, behind the scenes, contrary to Facebook's public statements, the company has proposed many ways to require third-party applications to indemnify Facebook for access to its users' data, including direct payments, advertising expenses and data sharing. arrangements. It's not unusual for collaborating companies to share information about their customers, but Facebook has access to sensitive data that many other businesses do not have.
As part of these discussions in 2012, Zuckerberg said it was open up to a hundred transactions with developers, partly as a way of identifying the "real market value" of user data of the society.
Even though the social media giant finally gave up doing so, he ended up using the data as a stick against his competitors and shared it with partners he wanted to collaborate with and other companies with positive relationships with Facebook leaders – while avoiding to refuse. of those he considered a threat.
In short: Facebook treated user data not as something to protect, but as a tool to exploit for maximum profit.
Facebook told NBC News that it did not grant "preferential treatment to developers or partners because of their advertising spend or their relationship with executives."
Although many companies are taking advantage of the collection and sale of user data, Facebook's attempts to exploit them in this way – efforts discovered in a mine of 4,000 documents obtained by NBC News after being disclosed as part of of a lawsuit – are troubling. few reasons.
For its part, Zuckerberg said in 2009 that Facebook would never sell user data. On the other hand, it is the latest development of a recurring fight for society in terms of privacy protection on its platform.
Facebook's relationship with user data has been difficult. And his attitude towards privacy has caused tension with Instagram and WhatsApp.
It's far from being the first time that Facebook is running into big questions about how it treats user data. One of the company's biggest scandals occurred in the spring of 2018 and was centered on this issue even when the New York Times and the Guardian published articles revealing that the Cambridge Analytica policy consulting firm had accessed the data of nearly 87 million users without their knowledge.
This revelation was not only controversial because users did not realize how much their information was available even for Facebook applications that they had not approved, but also because of the way the data was potentially used: Cambridge Analytica, a company recruited by Trump In 2016, the campaign was known to exploit data to create voter profiles and target people directly.
Facebook has finally changed its rules for application developers, including academics who leaked the data to Cambridge Analytica, but this is one of many incidents that underscore the fact that privacy has not not treated as a priority by the Silicon Valley giant.
In fact, confidentiality was a relative footnote in Facebook's conversations about how she shared the data, write Solon and Farivar. Although Facebook did not ultimately sell user data to product developers, its value to the company's growth and the advertising that fueled it have always been obvious.
Leveraging user data to boost its ascendancy was a central element of Facebook's approach that sparked a series of clashes between Zuckerberg and the leaders of two key companies bought by the technology giant. The founders of WhatsApp, Brian Acton and Jan Koum, have frequently opposed Zuckerberg's views on privacy, according to a Wired article by Nicholas Thompson and Fred Vogelstein also released Tuesday. And the founders of Instagram, Kevin Systrom and Mike Krieger, also had their share of conflict.
One of those disagreements: Facebook used Instagram to test a location tracking feature, which the direction of the image-sharing application had pushed back.
The relationship between Thompson and Vogelstein was so controversial that Instagram's Systrom was likened to a particularly distressed Cabinet official, who had already been intimidated by President Donald Trump:
According to someone who had heard the conversation, Systrom was openly wondering if Zuckerberg was treating him like Donald Trump was treating Jeff Sessions: making life miserable by hoping that he would leave without having to be fired.
Why assigning "value" to user data can be an antitrust problem
As Solon and Farivar point out, one of the main consequences of this report is that Facebook's attempts to assign a specific monetary value to its user data could make it more vulnerable to antitrust regulation.
The reason for this? Facebook has long claimed that its user services are "free" because users do not specifically pay for the product, even if they share their own data. In the past, it was difficult for regulators to try to defend antitrust cases against "free" offers offered by technology companies.
In 2007, for example, a US court finally rejected a lawsuit against Google alleging that it was using its search engine in an anti-competitive manner. The court, at the time, said that "competition in the provision of free services" was beyond the scope of the law.
This could also be the case this time, Vox told Michael Carrier, a law professor at Rutgers University. "Even if users provide useful information to Facebook, they do not pay money to access the platform," he said. "And under the longstanding antitrust law, this is not enough for a violation of antitrust laws."
However, if Facebook assigns a separate value to the collected user data, this could indicate that the product is not so much free, but directly paid via this data, which makes the company more likely to be subject to a antitrust control, said an expert at NBC News.
"These emails clearly establish the value of consumer data for Facebook," said Jason Kint, CEO of Digital Content Next. "It shows that it's not free."
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