Facebook weakens privacy protections for 1.5bn users
Facebook is taking measures to shield 1.5billion of its users from incoming European data protection law, greatly reducing their privacy rights.
From next month users in Africa, Asia, Australia and Latin America will no longer have the same privacy rights as Europeans, when it switches the location of where their accounts are hosted.
The move appears to be an attempt to reduce its liability under the incoming General Data Protection Regulation, which restricts what companies can do with people's data. Facebook faces fines up to around $1.1bn (£770m) if found to be in breach of the law, which comes into effect on May 25.
Services for all its users bar Americans and Canadians are stored in Ireland, its European headquarters, but its plans would keep all those not based in Europe from the scrutiny of European lawmakers, reducing the company's exposure to huge fines, Reuters reported. The change affects more than 70pc of Facebook's two billion-plus members. As of December, Facebook had 239m users in the US and Canada, 370m in Europe and 1.52bn elsewhere.
Facebook told Reuters it plans to make the privacy controls and settings that Europe will get under GDPR available to the rest of the world. “We apply the same privacy protections everywhere, regardless of whether your agreement is with Facebook Inc or Facebook Ireland,” the company said.
Meanwhile, continued fallout from the Cambridge Analytica data-sharing scandal continued with new research that claimed by logging into websites or apps using a Facebook account, millions may have been exposed to big data companies quietly mining their personal information.
Marketing companies embedded in websites that use the “sign in with Facebook” function, were able to collect names, email addresses and in some cases track people around the web, privacy engineer and Princeton PhD student Steven Englehardt has found. Mr Englehardt, along with researchers Gunes Acar, and Arvind Narayanan found seven third parties abusing websites’ access to Facebook user data with one third party uses its own Facebook “application” to track users around the web.
These included OnAudience.com, Lytics and Tealium, which offer companies datasets to pad out their own customer information collection. If a company wants to know more about a customer, it can cross-examine its database to pad out any missing parts. OnAudience.com proudly states that it owns more than 9 billion profiles on its website.
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