Thread by @JuliaAngwin

In light of Facebook-Cambridge Analytica kerfuffle, it’s worth reviewing Facebook’s long history of lax enforcement against apps and partners who steal data from its users. /1

In 2010, I launched a series at the @WSJ called @WhatTheyKnow. Two of our blockbuster stories were about third parties using Facebook data without user knowledge. /2

First, @emilysteel found a company called Rapleaf that was scraping data from Facebook members and using it to target political ads

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Then @emilysteel and @geoffreyfowler found that Facebook was leaking identifying information about its users – names and in some cases, friends names – third party apps such as FarmVille.
wsj.com/articles/SB100…

Facebook blamed the leakage of identifiers on the Web browser makers, but said that it had “zero tolerance for data brokers” and would force Rapleaf to delete all the information it had in its possession.
developers.facebook.com/blog/post/422

But we now know that Facebook wasn’t too worried about those breaches. Last year a former FB product manager wrote an oped describing FB's lackluster approach to his effort to clean up the issues that we wrote about back in 2010.
nytimes.com/2017/11/19/opi…

There were very few consequences for the companies that took the FB data. Rapleaf sold itself to TowerData and now claims to be in the business offering “piping hot data.”

And Rapleaf founder Auren Hoffman started a new company called LiveRamp that was sold to huge data broker Acxiom and claims to be able to link people’s real identities to their behavior on cell phones, watching TV etc.
liveramp.com

So, in short, data theft has very few consequences for the the companies.

Oil companies spill oil - they pay for the cleanup.

Data companies spill data - we pay for our own cleanup as best we can by tweaking our privacy settings or vowing to quit Facebook. Weak sauce at best.