In response to pressure from the American Civil Liberties Union, Color of Change and the Center for Media Justice, Facebook announced today that it will..
In response to pressure from the American Civil Liberties Union, Color of Change and the Center for Media Justice, Facebook announced today that it will clarify its developer policy to explicitly prohibit the use of Facebook or Instagram data in surveillance tools.
The ACLU has revealed several instances of developers using information gleaned from Facebook’s APIs to create surveillance tools for law enforcement, and each time, Facebook has decided to revoke access to its data. In October, reporting by the ACLU uncovered the use of data from Facebook, Instagram and Twitter in the surveillance software Geofeedia, which culled protesters’ posts from the social media platforms and sold them to law enforcement. Twitter also cut access last year to social media monitoring firms Snaptrends and Media Sonar , the latter of which tracked hashtags like #BlackLivesMatter and #IAmMikeBrown to identify activists.
Facebook has contended that this kind of surveillance is already against its policies. But its policy was revamped today to state that developers can’t “use data obtained from us to provide tools that are used for surveillance.” Twitter made a similar declaration in November.
