Sorry, I'm a broken record here. please, I beg you press, don't just share FB's blog posts. Even if your outlet hasn't reported or added proper context, it's way better to link to a competitor's reports than to share FB's links.🙏🏼1/2
this post was from Monika Bickert. She's the lawyer copied on many things Facebook is currently being sued by 46 state AGs, she also reports into same group as their govt relations. Also, super important point - @sarasidnerCNN is doing amazing work so this isn't criticism. 2/2
Here is the image of the full post. Again, I do these as service announcements and reminders. The response is always a thanks and never thought about it. If you see news reports discussing it, I'm happy to share those and happy to have you do it, too.
Also credit where it's due. Maria Ressa taught me this one. Facebook, no different than misinfo artists, knows power of social media to proactively spread its version of a story. So if press helps provide velocity and reach then competes with each other to share truth, lies win.
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Dear press: Facebook comms is deceiving you (again) on these data leaks (see the 530mil last week). I encourage you not to agree purely to their OTR or background terms. Think Kellyanne Conway deception. No executive time / exclusives are worth it if the job is informing public.
eg 530mil leak, Facebook pushed out deceptive info on background to press. I’ve been asking @CaseyNewton for a week to fix this important error in his initial and influential report, respectfully provided explanation and an independent researcher’s contact info to explain to him.
A week later Facebook has watched the story die. Of course, that was their strategy and it leaked in the press today. BBC covered this earlier today, comms accidentally forwarded an internal email on how to characterize it as scraping of public information.
But. The. Phone. Numbers. Weren’t. Scraped. Facebook is successfully positioning this breach as simply “scraping.” I wouldn’t be surprised if they’re doing it proactively. They would rather have a bad story they can control than a really bad one they can’t. ⬇️
Situation: you have a private phone # Facebook has stored in your profile, it was uploaded for two-factor authentication, and it’s set so that only you can see it. Meanwhile, the # is discovered and linked to you personally in bulk hacking of Facebook tools. Is that *scraping*?
linking back to the original thread on this incident. We had a public gathering of hundreds including the researchers who found it along with the press trying to untangle it in order to try to get to the facts. Here are relevant passages.
Pro tip: if you own an iOS device, next week is likely to bring you the most significant improvement in digital privacy in the history of the internet. And it will kneecap Facebook. 🍿
It’s why Facebook was running national ad campaigns, Facebook’s trade group was filing lawsuits, et al. Meanwhile, Google and others are faking privacy efforts on browser to keep up.
We’re about to find out what Facebook refuses to admit. It’s a 21st century version of direct mail. Without your data, no advertiser would choose to run its ads adjacent to FB’s unmanaged, unpredictable user-generated content environments. They’ll still dominate but this hurts.
Note on 8/2/16:
-US now confirmed Manafort passed privileged polling data to Russian intelligence
-Gates 302 already stated poll data included Cambridge Analytica
-Facebook employees were working in same office as Cambridge Analytica and Trump campaign /1 nytimes.com/2021/04/15/us/…
- SEC complaint cited evidence of Facebook employees raising “red flags” about this
- co-founder who sold FB’s data to Cambridge Analytica *was working for Facebook*
- Facebook also had 6+ million fake accounts manipulating news pages (later buried by company in April 2017) /2
- only a few months ago, this massive report showed the data was used to deter voters in key states. This would mean top Facebook execs misled and Trump campaign manager lied under oath (he also had a national news meltdown hours before the TV report). /3 channel4.com/news/revealed-…
Google’s scheme “FLoC” to protect its surveillance advertising biz model and the economics of horizontal data mining across the web to be blocked by actual privacy-focused browsers (Google’s Chrome is not one). /1 digiday.com/media/browser-…
It’s important to note Google’s other proposal (“Fledge”) is a bit different and doesn’t raise these same concerns. Yes, there are a lot of birds. Don’t even get me started on “Swan” which should be dead on arrival based on who is proposing it let alone the concept. /2
Any scheme which attempts to preserve functionality similar to how a 3rd party cookie could be used to track users around the web (this includes the terrible idea of hashed emails) is not solving for the future, not recognizing users’ rights many now backed up by law. /3