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  Geebo 9:02 am on April 9, 2018 Permalink | Reply
  Tags: CubeYou, data breach, Facebook ( 178 ), Mark Zuckerberg ( 7 ), Senator John Neely Kennedy   

  Senator to Facebook: “We Can Do It The Easy Way Or The Hard Way” 

  

  U.S. Senator John Neely Kennedy (R-La.)

  While we await further news on any prosecutorial action against Backpage, Facebook continues to dominate the headlines with more potential data breaches and a possible Congressional showdown.

  The first bit of news that made headlines over the weekend was that Facebook divulged another potentially damaging data breach that happened in a similar vein to that of the Cambridge Analytica scandal. Facebook is said to have suspended operations with an analytical firm called CubeYou. CubeYou was accused of harvesting personal data from Facebook users through those quizzes that many people take on Facebook that appear on the surface to be innocuous. In this instance, CubeYou is accused of allegedly using the information collected to sell to marketers.

  How many more of these analytical firms are collecting Facebook user data against Facebook’s wishes? That’s what U.S. Senator John Kennedy would like to know. Yesterday Senator Kennedy, no relation to the famous Kennedy political family, appeared on Face the Nation and had a warning for Mark Zuckerberg. In the mostly friendly interview Senator Kennedy stated that he doesn’t want to regulate Facebook ‘half to death’, however, he also said that if Facebook is unwilling or incapable of fixing their problems, the Senator said “We can do this the easy way, or the hard way” in regard to Mark Zuckerberg’s expected appearance before Congress this week.

  Senator Kennedy seems like he has a good grasp on this situation at hand with Facebook. It appears that Senator Kennedy could either be Mark Zuckerberg’s best friend or worst enemy depending on how forthcoming the Facebook CEO will be with Congress this week.

   

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  Geebo 9:01 am on March 19, 2018 Permalink | Reply
  Tags: Cambridge Analytica ( 3 ), data breach, Election ( 21 ), Facebook ( 178 ), Steve Bannon   

  50 million Facebook accounts exposed in political data breach 

  

  In a story that seems like it was taken straight from the 1988 sci-fi movie ‘They Live’, a large data firm is accused of allegedly breaching the Facebook accounts of 50 million US voters in order to ‘change audience behavior’. It was supposedly done, once again, to try to influence the 2016 Presidential election.

  Cambridge Analytica is accused of allegedly using a paid survey app that was disguised as a personality test. The app required users to log in through Facebook. After a user logged into Facebook, the app would not only harvest the information of the user, but also data from everyone in the user’s friends list. Trump advisor Steve Bannon was a board member of Cambridge Analytica and, according to the New York Times, “was intrigued by the possibility of using personality profiling to shift America’s culture and rewire its politics.”

  To make matters worse, Facebook allegedly knew of the misuse of the data and did little about it except to ask Cambridge Analytica to delete the information they had. Again, the New York Times claims that the data was not deleted and was discoverable online. So this seems like it is another instance where Facebook supposedly knew of alleged election interference and chose to do next to nothing about it. Many lawmakers are even calling for Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg to testify before Congress. It’s about high time that he did since it’s obvious he really has little to no control over what’s really happening throughout Facebook and the detrimental effect it has on our society.

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