Facebook’s late Friday disclosure that a
data analytics company with ties to the Trump campaign improperly obtained —
and then failed to destroy — the private data of 50 million users is generating
more unwanted attention from politicians, some of whom were already beating the
drums of regulation in the company’s direction.
On
Saturday morning, Facebook dove into the semantics of its disclosure, arguing
against wording in the New York Times story the company was attempting to get
out in front of that referred to the incident as a breach. Most of this happened
on the Twitter account of Facebook chief security officer Alex Stamos before
Stamos took down his tweets and the gist of the conversation made its way into
an update to Facebook’s official post.
“People
knowingly provided their information, no systems were infiltrated, and no
passwords or sensitive pieces of information were stolen or hacked,” the added
language argued.
I have deleted my
Tweets on Cambridge
Analytica, not because they were factually
incorrect but because I should have done a better job weighing in.
— Alex Stamos
(@alexstamos) March 17, 2018
While the
language is up for debate, lawmakers don’t appear to be looking kindly on
Facebook’s arguably legitimate effort to sidestep data breach notification laws
that, were this a proper hack, could have required the company to disclose that
it lost track of the data of 50 million users, only 270,000 of which consented
to data sharing to the third party app involved. (In April of 2015, Facebook
changed its policy, shutting down the API that shared friends data with
third-party Facebook apps that they did not consent to sharing in the first
place.)
While most
lawmakers and politicians haven’t crafted formal statements yet (expect a
landslide of those on Monday), a few are weighing in. Minnesota Senator Amy
Klobuchar calling for Facebook’s chief executive — and not just its counsel —
to appear before the Senate Judiciary committee.
Facebook breach: This is a major breach that must be investigated. It’s
clear these platforms can’t police themselves. I’ve called for more
transparency & accountability for online political ads. They say “trust
us.” Mark Zuckerberg needs to testify before Senate Judiciary.
— Amy Klobuchar
(@amyklobuchar) March 17, 2018
Senator
Mark Warner, a prominent figure in tech’s role in enabling Russian interference
in the 2016 U.S. election, used the incident to call attention to a piece of
bipartisan legislation called the Honest Ads Act, designed to “prevent foreign
interference in future elections and improve the transparency of online
political advertisements.”
“This is
more evidence that the online political advertising market is essentially the
Wild West,” Warner said in a statement. “Whether it’s allowing Russians to
purchase political ads, or extensive micro-targeting based on ill-gotten user
data, it’s clear that, left unregulated, this market will continue to be prone
to deception and lacking in transparency.”
That call
for transparency was echoed Saturday by Massachusetts Attorney General Maura
Healey who announced that her office would be launching an investigation into
the situation. “Massachusetts residents deserve answers immediately from
Facebook and Cambridge Analytica,” Healey tweeted. TechCrunch has reached
out to Healey’s office for additional information.
On Cambridge Analytica’s side, it looks possible that the
company may have violated Federal Election Commission laws forbidding foreign
participation in domestic U.S.
elections. The FEC enforces a “broad prohibition on foreign national activity
in connection with elections in the United States .”
“Now is a
time of reckoning for all tech and internet companies to truly consider their
impact on democracies worldwide,” said Nuala O’Connor, President of the Center
for Democracy & Technology. “Internet users in the U.S. are left
incredibly vulnerable to this sort of abuse because of the lack of
comprehensive data protection and privacy laws, which leaves this data
unprotected.”
Just what
lawmakers intend to do about big tech’s latest privacy debacle will be more
clear come Monday, but the chorus calling for regulation is likely to grow
louder from here on out.
No comments:
Post a Comment