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Facebook Sued by Investors Over Voter-Profile Harvesting
- jayess 9y ago...and here come the lawyer vultures (full disclosure, I'm a lawyer).
- toomuchtodo 9y agoLying to your investors is securities fraud. Enthusiastic about what the discovery process uncovers.
- Pilfer 9y agoWhat material fact did Facebook lie to their investors about?
- craftyguy 9y agoYea I'm still baffled why this is 'news'. Facebook and Mark Z have been very upfront with investors and the public about the lack of privacy that users should expect when using their platform.
- smt88 9y agoThey haven't been upfront. That's the whole point. They violated their own policies, allowed others to do it, and failed to disclose it.
- craftyguy 9y agohttps://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/style/mark-zuckerbergs-theory-of-privacy/2014/02/03/2c1d780a-8cea-11e3-95dd-36ff657a4dae_story.html https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/style/mark-zuckerbe...
- cryptoz 9y agoFrom the article, > “defendants made false or misleading statements and failed to disclose that Facebook violated its own data privacy policies by allowing third parties access to personal data of millions of Facebook users without their consent,” according to the complaint.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- 734786710934 9y agoUsers did consent when they approved CA's app. The only argument that can be made is that they didn't fully know what they were consenting to.
- madeofpalk 9y agoUsers that used the ‘CA’ mydigitallife app did consent, but the millions of other profiles that they were able to scrape in definitely didn’t consent.
- 734786710934 9y agoThis gets to the debate around if you can consent when giving up information about your friends. For example, is it OK for someone to give a company access to their phone's address book when the people in it haven't consented themselves?
- vuln 9y agoReminds me of Facebook and LinkedIn shadow profiles.
- madeofpalk 9y ago(which have been deemed illegal in some countries)
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- an4rchy 9y agoCan any lawyers summarize the actual lawsuit? What do these investors want exactly, more money? The stock price went up by any measure, from Feb 3, 2017 to Mar 19, 2018, so it can't be compensation for that. Unless they are willing to give those gains back?
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- Pilfer 9y agoI have read the lawsuit, and it accuses Facebook of making false and misleading statements in their data privacy policy. It takes issue with this section of Facebook's privacy policy: While you are allowing us to use the information we receive about you, you always own all of your information. Your trust is important to us, which is why we don't share information we receive about you with others unless we have: • received your permission; • given you notice, such as by telling you about it in this policy; or • removed your name and any other personally identifying information from it. The lawsuit claims Facebook violated bullet points 1 and 2, citing the CA news. The lawsuit uses this point to argue Facebook lied to their investors, did not provide more information on this in their SEC filings, and that investors suffering financial loss when the stock price fell after CA news.
- philipodonnell 9y agoIs that policy dated? Its possible a different privacy policy was in effect when all this went down.
- toomuchtodo 9y agoFacebook has lost almost $60 billion in value since the CA story broke. If you’re an investor, and this information wasn’t publicly available to you, you might feel aggrieved and want to seek compensation.
- 734786710934 9y agoShould investors be able to sue a company anytime its stock goes down?
- throwaway84742 9y agoI find it remarkable that when Obama did something similar in 2012, it was hailed as a major strength of his campaign and nobody had any problems with FB.
- cjsawyer 9y agoTheir work was upfront and they weren’t trying to buy info or hide behind an unrelated app. This feels scummy in comparison.
- throwaway84742 9y agoTheir work was so “upfront” that FB internal monitoring alerts have fired from the spike in load, and FB assured them that this is OK and they are “on the same side”: https://www.google.com/amp/thehill.com/opinion/technology/379245-whats-genius-for-obama-is-scandal-when-it-comes-to-trump%3famp https://www.google.com/amp/thehill.com/opinion/technology/37... Bad optics, no matter how you slice it.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- rdtsc 9y agoAs sibling comment pointed they were about just as scummy on average but everyone decided to look away and pretend to not notice, even FB after they caught them siphoning all social graph data. Well actually that's not quite accurate, some didn't look away, they were singing praises. His campaign won a major marketing award in 2008, beating Coke, Nike and Apple: http://adage.com/article/moy-2008/obama-wins-ad-age-s-marketer-year/131810/ http://adage.com/article/moy-2008/obama-wins-ad-age-s-market... --- I honestly look at Obama's campaign and I look at it as something that we can all learn from as marketers [...] to see what he's done, to be able to create a social network ... Jon Fine, marketing and media columnist for BusinessWeek, pointed to Mr. Obama's facility with engaging voters in social-media channels. "It's the fuckin' Web 2.0 thing," he said. --- (Sorry for repeated link, I know it has been posted many times but I think it perfectly illustrates the point well).
- jjxw 9y agoThis happens any time a public company's stock goes down because of unexpected news. Investors sue for breach of fiduciary duty in an attempt to recover losses in the share price as a result of alleged negative, material information being withheld from the public by the company's management. That being said - this should be particularly interesting given the topic. Securities fraud cases are usually boring, but this lawsuit may bring to light more details on exactly what FB didn't disclose.
- downandout 9y ago"...defendants made false or misleading statements and failed to disclose that Facebook violated its own data privacy policies by allowing third parties access to personal data of millions of Facebook users without their consent..." The "without their consent" part is BS, as is this lawsuit. When you use Facebook platform apps, you have to consent to the disclosure of your information to the developer, and have to agree to allow whatever special permissions the developer is asking for. As for friend data that apps may have access to, when you sign up for and use Facebook, you agree to the terms and conditions, which allow this behavior. Investors had the opportunity to view both the developer platform policies and Facebook TOS long before they ever bought shares. If they didn't like the possible implications of them, they should not have invested. My guess is that this case will go nowhere.
- hashkb 9y agoThis seems super obvious to me too. The more important question, from which this is a distraction, is: what was The Donald's role?
- oldcynic 9y agoCorrect me where I'm wrong but did it not used to be the case that facebook apps could access almost as much info about your friends as they could about you? So where is the consent? Fred gives consent to run a personality quiz and its associated data gathering - Fred's 180 friends didn't.
- downandout 9y agoThat consent is contained in the TOS that you and all of your friends agreed to when you signed up for Facebook. Further, the access to friend data has always been more limited than you imply here, and more recently, it’s become so limited that using apps for data collection about friends is almost a pointless endeavor.
- vkou 9y agoIf you were to ask 30 Facebook users whether or not Fred taking a stupid personality quiz leaked all their info, 29 of them would say no. This is why we need informed consent for data collection.
- beedogs 9y agoI'll truly never understand the people who defend Facebook to the death on here.
- cryoshon 9y agounfortunately some people are boot lickers by nature. or perhaps they need to believe facebook is innocent to justify what they're working on.
- urda 9y agoI've already ran across at least one user who was obviously astroturfing trying to play down FB's involvement in this crap, it's actually kind of horrifying to see on here.
- bdcravens 9y agoIt's part of the startup mythos: lone wolf (nerdy dev in a hoodie no less), builds a CRUD app, becomes stupidly rich via nothing but the hustle. Attacks on that weaken the foundation of belief.
- discordance 9y agoA bunch of people on here work for FB...
- underwater 9y agoFor some perspective: I’m ex-Facebook. I wouldn’t claim that Facebook are completely benign, but I think they’re getting a raw deal in this situation. The argument that they shared too much information with third parties is a fair one. I don’t know if it was caused by naivety or apathy. But they never hid what they were doing from users. And, unlike some are claiming, they definitely didn’t sell that information. It was Cambridge Analytica who chose to “weaponise” (their word) that data. The engineer who acted as a whistleblower is currently playing the victim but chose to participate in a morally bankrupt project.
- dfxm12 9y agoOn the one side, you have Facebook. On the other, you have lawyers trying to bring a questionable suit and wealthy investors upset that their portfolio's value went down slightly short term. This is not the thread to get sanctimonious about people defending Facebook.
- wu-ikkyu 9y agoDoes anyone know the percentage of Zuck's total FB stock that he has sold in the past year? It looks like a lot but have not been able to find a precise percentage change.
- ppbutt 9y agoSo when is everybody going to band together to bury Facebook and all these other insidious tech companies?
- _xczx 9y agoDunno. I just deleted mine, was sort of annoying not being able to find mobile phone numbers or emails for people I'd like to stay in touch with. I think that it'd be good to have a script that scrapes facebook id's, names, mobile numbers etc from your friends list, or some automation to prepare for deleting your account.
- Tempest1981 9y agoThis? How can I download a copy of my Facebook data? https://www.facebook.com/help/302796099745838 https://www.facebook.com/help/302796099745838
- _xczx 9y agoI clicked that yesterday and got a notification telling me that it would take a while to get the copy of the data. Still waiting. In the meantime, a user who clicks that button has to guess whether it's safe to delete their facebook while facebook is getting the data. However, the facebook data isn't good enough because I found that most of my friends didn't put in their contact information. So whether you download a copy of the facebook data or not, you're going to lose contacts (you decide whether it matters) and the rest you're going to need to call friends of friends and find the contact info you need, or ask people directly on facebook for their information.
- null000 9y agoRemember, you can do pretty much whatever you want just as long as you don't screw over rich people. Probably wouldn't be seeing this headline if it weren't the investors that were upset.
- sAbakumoff 9y agoThere should be also the class action lawsuit filled by owners of harvested profiles. Hope to see that soon and celebrate the beginning of the end of Facebook.
- DyslexicAtheist 9y agoThe media discusses voter-profile harvesting mostly in a past context of Brexit and US elections. These countries are politically stable. A far more dangerous picture paints itself in emerging and poor economies. For example FB recently announced it would roll out job-posts[1] for low-income workers. In poor parts of Europe like Croatia, Serbia, BiH & Balkans (where I chose to live and work as a foreigner), many people use Facebook to find work and network w/ colleagues. In these locations facebook is the Internet. Often you usually accept a friend request before you are able to discuss a job. FB job market will lock in users from those regions even further. These economies don't stand a chance and are already bled dry thanks to facebook & Co not paying their taxes. These locations already suffering a huge braindrain of local talent. Their local society / governments are becoming increasingly corrupt[2] because and honest work opportunities are so scarce some people (like nurses or occupational therapists helping the elderly and disabled) even work for free[3] (I know several people who have the choice of working for free or not be able to graduate). So many people just leave to the North where they find themselves in slave-labor like conditions in Germany[4]. (sorry for switching focus to Germany for a second I'm trying to show some causality). It's not limited to healthcare. Literally any industry has setups where shady middle-man benefit from Germanys "Arbeitnehmerüberlassungsgesetz" (yes that's a word) which is Germany's outsourcing law (a law criticized for creating a dual class workforce) and they are making a killing thanks to the many loopholes present to exploit foreigners/minorities. When facebook rolls out it's job postings for low-skilled and low-paid jobs it's targeting the most vulnerable minorities in politically volatile regions. One takeaway from the facebook/CA election meddling is that because majority of people in Balkans are already depending on facebook, it's even easier to spread disinformation and rig elections. And it's giving powers to local crime gangs which usually influence 100% of the electorate[5]. Ask yourself what data harvesting means in these regions, who benefits and what effects this might have 3-5 years from now. [1] https://techcrunch.com/2018/02/28/facebook-job-posts/ https://techcrunch.com/2018/02/28/facebook-job-posts/ [2] https://euobserver.com/political/136664 https://euobserver.com/political/136664 [3] http://www.etf.europa.eu/pubmgmt.nsf/%28getAttachment%29/760B6259DCF4BE41C125766600572DC8/$File/NOTE7XJLM2.pdf http://www.etf.europa.eu/pubmgmt.nsf/%28getAttachment%29/760... [4] http://www.dw.com/en/foreign-nurses-exploited-by-unfair-private-contracts/a-17728464 http://www.dw.com/en/foreign-nurses-exploited-by-unfair-priv... [5] https://www.amazon.com/McMafia-Journey-Through-Criminal-Underworld/dp/1400095123 https://www.amazon.com/McMafia-Journey-Through-Criminal-Unde...
- colony 9y agofacebook and other giant sites, they have more information about us then our friends.