I really don’t believe that Facebook cares about your privacy. I say that because a new report from The Intercept reveals Facebook sharing sensitive personal data with mobile carriers:
A confidential Facebook document reviewed by The Intercept shows that the social network courts carriers, along with phone makers — some 100 different companies in 50 countries — by offering the use of even more surveillance data, pulled straight from your smartphone by Facebook itself.
Offered to select Facebook partners, the data includes not just technical information about Facebook members’ devices and use of Wi-Fi and cellular networks, but also their past locations, interests, and even their social groups. This data is sourced not just from the company’s main iOS and Android apps, but from Instagram and Messenger as well.
It gets worse. This might be illegal:
Some experts are particularly alarmed that Facebook has marketed the use of the information — and appears to have helped directly facilitate its use, along with other Facebook data — for the purpose of screening customers on the basis of likely creditworthiness [for ad serving]. Such use could potentially run afoul of federal law, which tightly governs credit assessments.
Now, Facebook does admit to this. But they put some interesting spin on things:
Actionable Insights was announced last year in an innocuous, easy-to-miss post on Facebook’s engineering blog. The article, titled “Announcing tools to help partners improve connectivity,” strongly suggested that the program was primarily aimed at solving weak cellular data connections around the world. “To address this problem,” the post began, “we are building a diverse set of technologies, products, and partnerships designed to expand the boundaries of existing connectivity quality and performance, catalyze new market segments, and bring better access to the unconnected” […]
The blog post makes only a brief mention of Actionable Insights’ second, less altruistic purpose: “enabling better business decisions” through “analytics tools.” According to materials reviewed by The Intercept and a source directly familiar with the program, the real boon of Actionable Insights lies not in its ability to fix spotty connections, but to help chosen corporations use your personal data to buy more tightly targeted advertising.
What’s clear in all of this is that Facebook really does not care about you, or the security of your data. It only wants to make as much money as possible off your data regardless of what the cost to their user base is. That’s unacceptable and if I were you, I would dump any Facebook product off your phone ASAP. I would also stop using any Facebook service as well because there are only two ways that these clowns will get the message. One is if governments worldwide decide to restrict what Facebook can do. And second is if users of their various Facebook owned properties dump said Facebook owned properties. Either one will send a clear message that Facebook’s behavior is completely unacceptable.