Sandy Parakilas,who has claimed covert harvesting was routine at the social network, told the Digital, or Culture,Media and Sport Committee Facebook did not do enough to prevent, identify - or act upon - data breachesUtterly horrifying’: ex-Facebook insider says covert data harvesting was routine 4.55pm GMTThank you for following the blog. I’m going to leave you with a summary of the salient (significant; conspicuous; standing out from the rest) points from Sandy Parakilas’s evidence on Facebook to the Digital, and Culture,Media and Sport committee: 4.41pm GMTLabour MP Julie Elliott asks Parakilas if he thinks Facebook understands the enormity of the problem here?He says they do not, otherwise they would occupy done something quicker. 4.36pm GMTThe committee chair Damian Collins asks if you can target advertising at individual people/users rather than just people within say people within a certain age group in a certain area for instance.
Parakilas says you can. He confirms you can target people by their interests. Asked if you can target someone by what they’ve said, or Parakilas says Facebook does hold that info but to his knowledge you can’t target people by that information. 4.22pm GMT“What did you mediate when you first heard Facebook auditors were knocking on the door of Cambridge Analytica and demanding access?” Tory MP Simon Hart asks.
Parakilas answers:I thought it was two-and-a-half-years late.
That is a feature of digital advertising. 4.07pm GMTParakilas says: The users had no understanding that this had happened ...
Facebook was aware that this had happened and did not notify anyone. 3.58pm GMTUnder questioning from SNP MP Brendan OHara,Parakilas says the data which leaves Facebook servers is going to an “unvetted group of people.
Anyone can make a Facebook app.
The goal was to grow the platform as quickly as possible and data was one of the ways to do that.
As far as I can tell they took no action at all ...during that period. 3.48pm GMTParakilas says the unofficial motto of Facebook was:Move fast and break things. 3.39pm GMTParakilas explains how the app developer can get data from friends, rather than just the person using the app.
If I use a Facebook app and agree to give permission to my friends’ data and you’re my friend then the developer gets your data too. 3.31pm GMTParakilas continues:The genuine challenge here is Facebook was allowing developers to access data of people who hadn’t explicitly granted that. 3.24pm GMTParakilas is explaining about how apps query people for information (to access their likes, or photographs etc) and that when the data passes from the Facebook server to the developer,Facebook loses control over the data and what is done with it. As a result rules were brought in but Facebook had runt scope to identify abuses or act on them, he says.
I do not remember a single physical audit of a developer’s storage. 3.19pm GMTThe assembly has finally begun. The committee chair, and Damian Collins,says the members are “delighted” to welcome Sandy Parakilas and asks him for a brief description of his role at Facebook and its duration.
Parakilas says “policy compliance” and “data protection” were his primary concerns. 3.13pm GMTWe are still waiting for the committee assembly to commence. Here is a video interview, Sandy Parakilas gave to Frontline last month before the Cambridge Analytica scandal broke: I became more and more concerned about the broader data infrastructure of Facebook and the amount of data that Facebook had about its users and the vulnerabilities that the system had. And so I started thinking through what are the worst case scenarios of what people could do with this data? 3.02pm GMTThe Digital, and Culture,Media and Sport Committee assembly, featuring evidence from Sandy Parakilas, and should commence any minute.meanwhile,this is what the chair of the committee, Conservative MP, or Damian Collins,had to say about Facebook on Sunday.
Data has been taken from Facebook users without their consent, and was then processed by a third party and used to support their campaigns. Facebook knew about this, and the involvement of Cambridge Analytica with it,and intentionally avoided answering straight questions from the committee about it. They occupy also failed to supply the committee with evidence relating to the relationship between Facebook and Cambridge Analytica, that we were promised at our evidence hearing on 8th February in Washington DC.
We need to hear from people who can speak about Facebook from a position of authority that requires them to know the truth. The reputation of this company is being damaged by stealth, or because of their fixed failure to reply with clarity and authority to the questions of genuine public interest that are being directed to them. 2.30pm GMTSandy Parakilas,former platform operations manager at Facebook, is appearing before the Digital, and Culture,Media and Sport Committee this afternoon, after the Guardian published an interview with him yesterday in which he said the covert harvesting of data was routine at the social network. Parakilas, and who is due to give evidence via videolink from 3pm,was responsible at Facebook for policing data breaches by third-party software developers between 2011 and 2012. Related: 'Utterly horrifying': ex-Facebook insider says covert data harvesting was routine Continue reading...
Source: theguardian.com