Facebook changes ad, message policies
After playing down problems with the site for months, Facebook has begun to make changes after revelations that the political consulting firm Cambridge Analytica had improperly harvested the data of up to 87 million users.
The Menlo Park company announced a series of moves meant to improve the transparency of political ads and pages on its social media service. The changes came just days before CEO Mark Zuckerberg is to testify before Congress.
Zuckerberg said in a post that Facebook has started requiring advertisers to verify their identity and location before they can run political ads. That verification is meant to prevent foreign interference in elections, like the paid posts by Russian trolls ahead of the 2016 presidential election.
Zuckerberg added that he supports a proposed Senate bill, the Honest Ads Act, that would require such disclo-
sures.
Facebook will also start verifying the identify and location of people who run large Facebook pages, Zuckerberg said. Officials say Russian agents used pages to pose as Americans on different sides of the political spectrum in an attempt to spread misinformation before the election.
“These steps by themselves won’t stop all people trying to game the system. But they will make it a lot harder for anyone to do what the Russians did during the 2016 election and use fake accounts and pages to run ads,” Zuckerberg said in his post.
Users who have wondered whether their data was shared with Cambridge Analytica will learn more next week. Starting Monday, all 2.2 billion Facebook users will receive a notice on their feeds, “Protecting Your Information,” with a link to see what apps they use and what information they have shared with those apps. If they want, they can shut off apps individually or turn off third-party access to their apps completely.
In addition, Facebook said Friday, the users who might have had their data shared with Cambridge Analytica will get a more detailed message informing them of this. Facebook says most of the affected users (more than 70 million) are in the U.S., though there are over a million each in the Philippines, Indonesia and the United Kingdom.
Cambridge Analytica whistle-blower Christopher Wylie estimated that more than 50 million people were compromised by a personality quiz that collected data from users and their friends.
That Facebook app, called This Is Your Digital Life, was a personality quiz created in 2014 by an academic researcher named Aleksander Kogan, who paid about 270,000 people to take it. The app vacuumed up not just the data of the people who took it, but also — thanks to Facebook’s loose restrictions — data from their friends, too, including details that they hadn’t intended to share publicly.
Facebook later limited the data that apps can access, but it was too late in this case.
Also Friday, Facebook acknowledged that it has been secretly deleting some messages that Zuckerberg sent through its Messenger application — an option that hasn’t been available to most of the social network’s users.
The company says it has been removing Zuckerberg’s messages from the in-boxes of various people for several years. The recipients of Zuckerberg’s messages weren’t informed before that happened. Facebook made the acknowledgement Friday after TechCrunch first reported the tactic.
Facebook says it began erasing the messages of Zuckerberg and a few other top executives in 2014 after computer hackers obtained and released emails from Sony Pictures executives. The Sony messages included disparaging remarks about movie stars and other people in the entertainment industry.
Although the ability to automatically delete sent texts hadn’t been previously available, Facebook says it now plans to make it available to all users. The company apologized for not doing so sooner.
Reeling from its worst privacy crisis in history Facebook is in full damage-control mode. In interviews and a conference call, Zuckerberg said he made a “huge mistake” in failing to take a broad enough view of what Facebook’s responsibility is in the world. He’s set to testify before Congress next week.
Chief Operating Officer Sheryl Sandberg told NBC’s “Today” show that Facebook should have done more to verify the assurances that Cambridge Analytica had deleted the improperly obtained information.
“What we didn’t do is the next step of an audit, and we’re trying to that now,” she said.
Sandberg also told NBC that if users were able to opt out of being shown ads, “at the highest level, that would be a paid product.” This does not mean the company is planning to let users do this. Zuckerberg has made similar statements in the past, but has added that Facebook remains committed to offering a free service paid for by advertising.
Facebook users can opt out of seeing specific ads but can’t shut off ads altogether. Neither can they opt entirely out of Facebook’s data collection.
Facebook is also facing an investigation by the Federal Trade Commission in what’s become its worst privacy crisis in its 14-year history.
Then, some users who logged in to Facebook through Android devices discovered that Facebook had been collecting information about phone calls they made and text messages they sent. Facebook also acknowledged this week that nearly all of its 2.2 billion users may have had their public data scraped by “malicious actors” it did not name.
The changes will make it harder “to do what the Russians did ... and use fake accounts ... to run ads.”
Mark Zuckerberg blog post