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As part of its mission to close the gates of the barn after the release of the cows, Facebook suspended the accounts of the British data analysis company Crimson Hexagon due to problems inappropriate management of user data.
For years, the company has used official APIs to siphon public messages from Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and other online sources, collating and analyzing for different purposes, for example to evaluate the Public opinion about a candidate or a political subject. It has customers all over the world, serving Russia and Turkey as well as the United States and the United Kingdom.
Facebook did not seem fully aware of the use of user data by Crimson Hexagon, including in several government contracts. what he did not have the opportunity to evaluate before they took effect. The possibility that the company is not complying with its data use rules, especially that they helped build surveillance tools, was apparently real enough for Facebook to act. "We are studying allegations about Crimson Hexagon to see if they have violated any of our policies," said Ime Archibong, vice president of Facebook's product partnerships. The Wall Street Journal, which reported the suspension for the first time, noted that Crimson Hexagon currently has a contract with FEMA to monitor the online discussion for various reasons related to disasters, but an agreement with ICE failed because Twitter resisted this request. However, beyond the suggestion that the company has undertaken a work that bypasses what social media companies consider to be an appropriate use of public data, Crimson Hexagon does not appear to have done anything about it. as blatant as the wholesale network collection made by others. It is limited to the publicly available data that it pays to access, and applies its own methods to produce its own brand of insight and intelligence.
The company is not either (at least not obviously) a quasi-independent branch of a large, shady network of companies that were actively working to mask their connections and transactions, as the company did. was Cambridge Analytica. Crimson Hexagon is above the board of directors, with ordinary venture capital investments and partnerships. His work is similar to that of AC, in that he gleans ideas of a perhaps disturbing nature from billions of public positions, but he does so at least in detail .
As before, the burden of liability on Facebook to force partners to engage in scrupulous treatment of user data. It's not a good data management for Facebook to let businesses take what they need under a handshake agreement that they will not hurt, and then take them to task for years longer. late when the damage has already been done. But this seems to be the company's top priority now: to reiterate the folk metaphor from above, it's frantically counting the cows who bolted by apologizing for letting the door go open for the last decade or more.
Incidentally, Crimson Hexagon was co-founded by the same person who was put in charge of Facebook's new social science initiative: Gary King of Harvard. In a statement, he denied any involvement in the daily work of the first, although he is president. There is no doubt that this connection will also be the subject of close scrutiny on the part of Facebook.
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