Lawmakers are again unhappy with Facebook after the latest big story again portraying Facebook’s failure to protect the private data of its users. Yesterday, the New York Times reported that the company had special relationships with a handful of major tech companies, including Amazon, Micros…
Lawmakers are again unhappy with Facebook after the latest big story again portraying Facebook’s failure to protect the private data of its users.
Yesterday, the New York Times reported that the company had special relationships with a handful of major tech companies, including Amazon, Microsoft and Spotify. The report alleges that Facebook allowed those partners forms of user data access that the company claimed it had curtailed prior to this year’s revelations around Facebook’s data sharing with Cambridge Analytica.
Facebook predictably pushed back against the report in a blog post, claiming that “none of these partnerships or features gave companies access to information without people’s permission, nor did they violate our 2012 settlement with the FTC.”
While Facebook dismisses much of the current criticism as a mischaracterization of these data sharing relationships, a number of lawmakers are, naturally, using the situation to nudge forward their own regulatory agendas.
Oregon Senator Ron Wyden, one of the fiercest privacy advocates in Congress, released a statement on the news: “Mark Zuckerberg had a lot of chutzpah telling Congress that Americans could control their data, when seemingly every other week Facebook faces a new privacy scandal for abusing our personal information,” Wyden said.
