Bad Boys Facebook and Google
by Miki Saxon
You’d have to be living on another planet not to be aware of the isht pulled by Facebook. Where do I start?
With the fact that Facebook is getting fined for storing millions of passwords in plain text or that they “unintentionally” uploaded a million and a half new member email contacts? Or that user data, such as friends, relationships and photos, was used to reward partners and fight rivals? Or might it bother you more to know that your posts, photos, updates, etc., whether public or private, are labeled and categorized by hand by outsourced works in India? Nastier is Facebook sharing/selling your data to cell phone carriers.
Offered to select Facebook partners, the data includes not just technical information about Facebook members’ devices and use of Wi-Fi and cellular networks, but also their past locations, interests, and even their social groups. This data is sourced not just from the company’s main iOS and Android apps, but from Instagram and Messenger as well. The data has been used by Facebook partners to assess their standing against competitors, including customers lost to and won from them, but also for more controversial uses like racially targeted ads.
Facebook owns Instagram, so it should come as no surprise that the private phone numbers and email addresses of millions of celebrities and influencers were scraped by a partner company.
Then there is Google, which dumps location data from millions of devices, not just Android, into a database called Sensorvault and makes it available for search to law enforcement, among others. On May 7 Google claimed it had found privacy religion, but on CNBC reported that Gmail tracks and saves every digital receipt, not just things, but services and, of course Amazon. Enterprise G Suite customers don’t fare much better. Their user passwords were kept un-encrypted on an internal server for years. Not hacked, but still…
YouTube is in constant trouble for the way it interprets its constantly changing Terms Of Service.
The list for all go on and on.
The European Union is far ahead of the US in terms of privacy, anticompetitive actions, etc., but US consumers are finally waking up. So-called Big Tech is no longer popular politically and the Justice Department is opening an antitrust investigation of Google (Europe already fined it nearly 3 billion in 2017 for anticompetitive actions).
Can Facebook be far behind?
A bit more next week.
Image credit: MySign AG
