In a newly leaked internal document, Facebook engineers admitted the social network did not know how to handle user data.
Motherboard just posted a 15-page internal document, purportedly from the Business and Promotional Products team Facebook, which describes the social network facing a “tsunami” of privacy regulations around the world. As a result, the company is forced to change the way it handles users’ personal data. However, “the bottom line is that the social network doesn’t know where all of its user data is going, or what it’s being used for,” the tech site said.
The document was written last year by privacy engineers on Facebook’s Advertising and Business Products team. Their mission is to “create meaningful connections between users and businesses”. The content revolved around warnings and calls for Facebook to change the way it handles user data to avoid trouble with regulators in Europe, the US, India and other regions.
“We’ve built systems that track and analyze user data in an open manner. As a result, data is haphazardly aggregated from first-party users to third-party and sensitive data. It’s all mixed up like pouring a bottle of multicolored ink into a lake,” the document states. “How to separate each color of ink into each vial, how to correctly classify each data label when they have been messed up? How to reorganize the data so that it flows only where it is allow?”.
The report also describes how Facebook is dealing with data usage regulations, such as new privacy laws in India, South Africa and elsewhere. While the regulator expects Facebook to deliver on its promises, in reality, the document shows that the social network is not able to deliver on its promises and that those are just empty promises.
“Facebook often stays in the dark when it comes to data it gets from billions of individual users. The platform is having a hard time making promises to countries about how we handle user data. The platform no specific level of control, no ability to fully explain how systems use data.Facebook engineers cannot confidently make policy changes about controls or promises about data use. For example, promises not to use X data for Y purposes,” the report states.
According to EnGadgetthe document shows that protecting user data and dealing with privacy-related issues is a “luxury matter” for Facebook.
Over the years, regulators around the world have tried to limit the exploitation of user data by platforms like Facebook. One of the most notable and important regulations is the EU’s GDPR Data Protection Act, which came into force from May 2018.
The law stipulates that personal data must be “collected for specific, clear, lawful purposes and not processed for other inappropriate purposes”. In the previous example, the user provided a phone number for two-factor authentication. But then, Facebook used this phone number to develop the “People You May Know” feature as well as provide it to advertisers. Facebook had to stop this activity after being discovered.
A Facebook spokesperson denied the conclusions referred to in the leaked document. “Global privacy regulations have different requirements, and that document simply reflects the technical solutions we’re building to manage data and meet obligations.” , the Facebook representative told Motherboard .
Khuong Nha (according to Vice)
at Blogtuan.info – Source: vnexpress.net – Read the original article here
