Announcement of the hearing date comes as Facebook faces scrutiny over its data collection following allegations that the political consulting firm Cambridge Analytica obtained data on tens of millions of Facebook users to try to influence elections.
Advertisement
” Facebook confirmed to us that the data of overall up to 2.7 million people in the European Union may have been improperly shared with Cambridge Analytica”, spokesman Christian Wigand told reporters. Instead, the company is fixing the plumbing.
To get authorised by Facebook, advertisers will now need to confirm their identity and location.
One of the biggest changes, which will begin on Monday 9 April, is to the app controls.
Facebook is also going to start verifying the people behind large Pages. He has spent more than eight years covering the ways that tech companies like Apple, Facebook and Google navigate the corridors of government – and the regulations that sometimes result. The data were intended for use by medical researchers.
Facebook says page administrators and advertisers will be asked to provide a government-issued ID for verification.
“These steps by themselves won’t stop all people trying to game the system”, wrote Facebook chief executive Mark Zuckerberg in a post Friday.
“At the end of the day, this is my responsibility”, Zuckerberg said. Yeah, me neither, that never happened to me, ever. The comparison to DARPA is not just a passing similarity either: Facebook hired former DARPA executive Regina Dugan to head up the division in 2016, although she left the post 18 months later. Facebook notes this is similar to how the retractions of Zuckerberg’s messages worked.
How important do you think it is to be able to “unsend” messages? The information was later transferred to third parties, including Cambridge Analytica, in violation of Facebook’s policies. He said the messages were “basically telling the Muslims, ‘Hey, there’s about to be an uprising of the Buddhists, so make sure that you are armed and go to this place.’ And then the same thing on the other side”.
Facebook planned to anonymize the information, so no individuals would be personally identified.
What this boils down to is Facebook tampering with the inboxes of its users, without notifying them.
One attack, Zuckerberg said, involved using recovery tools to track down other users. Since users were not happy with the time limit, the deadline has been extended.
Advertisement
In making the changes – for which the social media giant said it would hire new staff – Zuckerberg threw his support behind the Honest Ads Act, a measure authored by Sens.
