{"id":2092,"date":"2021-05-19T15:57:43","date_gmt":"2021-05-19T15:57:43","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/test.nahtnow.com\/?p=2092"},"modified":"2021-05-19T15:57:43","modified_gmt":"2021-05-19T15:57:43","slug":"facebook-data-breach-again-whose-to-blame","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/test.nahtnow.com\/en\/facebook-data-breach-again-whose-to-blame\/","title":{"rendered":"Facebook Data Breach Again, Whose To Blame?"},"content":{"rendered":"

Face book data breach:\u00a0 Did you know people who decided to put their personal information, such as Names, Birth Dates, and Telephone Numbers on Facebook Platform, have been stolen? Half a billion Facebook<\/a> users\u2019 personal information has been compromised,\u00a0 floating across the internet for anyone to see or use, without consent.\u00a0 Facebook\u2019s corporate headquarters, has no clue of who, or why this cyber attack is happening.<\/p>\n

Facebook has yet to give an explanation to <\/a>journalists\u2019 questions of why can’t this issue be stopped, and it is uncannily “reminiscent” of the Cambridge Analytica “scandal”.<\/a><\/p>\n

Three years on, \u201cCambridge Analytica\u201d is a byword for mass-data abuse, Facebook has been fined billions of dollars for failing to protect users\u2019 data and… not a thing has changed. If ever there were a moment to understand how profoundly all systems of accountability have failed, and continued to fail, it is this.<\/p>\n

Last week Nick Clegg, vice president of global affairs at Facebook, admitted on The Verge website that the Cambridge Analytica scandal had \u201crocked Facebook right down to its foundations\u201d. And yet it has learned nothing. It has paid no real price (the record $5 billion fine it paid to the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) is literally no price at all to Facebook), suffered no real consequences, and failed to answer any questions over the involvement of its executives.<\/p>\n

<\/div>\n

That impunity was in full sight this week. The news of the latest breach, of 533 million people\u2019s data, dropped over a holiday weekend; Facebook responded only by saying it was \u201cold data\u201d and the problem had been \u201cfound and fixed in August 2019\u201d \u2013 an absurd statement given that the data had only just been dumped on the internet, and clearly that hadn\u2019t been fixed at all.<\/p>\n

These are the actions of a company that knows it can get away with it. And repeatedly does. On Tuesday morning I submitted a set of questions to its press office: when was the issue first discovered? Did Facebook inform the regulators (as it is required to under US, UK and EU law)? If so, when? Had it informed users? But Facebook didn\u2019t respond. It still hasn\u2019t responded. It uses silence to throttle reporting, a strategy that works. It passes \u201cexclusive\u201d scoops to favorite reporters, and stonewalls the rest. Not just me. At an impromptu event on the data breach, journalists from Wired<\/em>, Politico <\/em>and Business Insider <\/em>revealed that it refused to answer their questions too.<\/p>\n

Instead it published a blogpost, The Facts on News Reports About Facebook Data, saying it wasn\u2019t hacked, the data was \u201cscraped\u201d. It later confirmed that it had no intention of informing users because it wasn\u2019t \u201cconfident\u201d who they were, users \u201ccould not fix the issue\u201d, and anyway, \u201cthe data was publicly available\u201d. What do you do when a trillion-dollar company with 2.8 billion users treats the public with brazen contempt? When it won\u2019t answer basic journalistic inquiries? When it ignores even the regulator? Ireland\u2019s Data Protection Commission \u2013 its lead regulator in Europe \u2013 released a pointed statement saying that it received \u201cno proactive communication\u201d from Facebook.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s this culture of impunity that makes Facebook such a dangerous company. Even where there are laws, it operates above them. There will be mass class actions that arise from this breach. But so what? It\u2019ll take years and anyway, it\u2019s only money. Money! As if Facebook cares. The Irish Data Protection Commission could act. But will it? Enforcements are hard, regulators respond to pressure, and in a news cycle that every day brings fresh new reports of Facebook enabling Nazis or driving teenagers to suicide, this story barely broke through.<\/p>\n

The US Congress has finally woken up to the danger of disinformation, but the disinformation from Facebook about Facebook is toxic and continues unabated \u2013 from its shiny new Oversight Board, a $130m exercise in evading responsibility, to the estimated $7m a year it invests in its own pet Lord Haw Haw, aka Sir Nick Clegg.<\/p>\n

War is not Peace. Love is not Hate. And the \u201cfacts\u201d Facebook published this week about the data breach aren\u2019t. They\u2019re dangerous, irresponsible, at best half-truths designed to enable it to get away with it, as it does again and again.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Face book data breach:\u00a0 Did you know people who decided to put their personal information, such as Names, Birth Dates, and Telephone Numbers on Facebook Platform, have been stolen? Half a billion Facebook users\u2019 personal information has been compromised,\u00a0 floating across the internet for anyone to see or use, without consent.\u00a0 Facebook\u2019s corporate headquarters, has Read More…<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":2095,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[875,39,40,5,1],"tags":[876],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/test.nahtnow.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2092"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/test.nahtnow.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/test.nahtnow.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/test.nahtnow.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/test.nahtnow.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2092"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/test.nahtnow.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2092\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2099,"href":"https:\/\/test.nahtnow.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2092\/revisions\/2099"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/test.nahtnow.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/2095"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/test.nahtnow.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2092"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/test.nahtnow.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2092"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/test.nahtnow.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2092"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}