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LovingA2andMI

(7,006 posts)
Mon Mar 19, 2018, 07:41 AM Mar 2018

Facebook may have violated FTC privacy deal, say former federal officials...

Source: Washington Post

Two former federal officials who crafted the landmark consent decree governing how Facebook handles user privacy say the company may have violated that decree when it shared information from tens of millions of users with a data analysis firm that later worked for President Trump’s 2016 campaign.

Such a violation, if eventually confirmed by the Federal Trade Commission, could lead to many millions of dollars in fines against Facebook, said David Vladeck, who as the director of the FTC’s Bureau of Consumer Protection oversaw the investigation of alleged privacy violations by Facebook and the subsequent consent decree resolving the case in 2011. He left that position in 2012.

On Sunday morning, Vladeck said in an interview with The Washington Post that Facebook’s sharing of data with Cambridge Analytica “raises serious questions about compliance with the FTC consent decree.”

The FTC did not immediately respond to requests for comment Sunday morning.

Facebook has denied violating the consent decree when it allowed an app developer working for Cambridge Analytica to gain access to information about estimated tens of millions of people. The group included both the 270,000 Facebook users who downloaded a psychological testing app and the Facebook “friends” of those people. This included the preferences those friends had expressed by hitting the widely used “like” button on social media posts or news stories.

In a statement Saturday, Facebook said, “We reject any suggestion of the violation of the consent decree. We respected the privacy settings that people had in place. Privacy and data protections are fundamental to every decision we make.”

Vladeck, now a professor at Georgetown Law, said violations of the consent decree could carry a penalty of $40,000 per violation, meaning that if news reports that the data of 50 million people were shared proves true, the company’s possible exposure runs into the trillions of dollars. Vladeck said that such a fine is unlikely but that the final penalty still could be very large.

“That’s the maximum exposure, though it’s not clear to me that the agency would insist on that kind of a penalty,” he said.

The FTC issue is rising as lawmakers in both the United States and Britain call for answers from Cambridge Analytica and Facebook — in some cases demanding that Facebook chief executive Mark Zuckerberg personally appear at legislative hearings.

The FTC consent decree required that users be notified and that they explicitly give their permission before data about them is shared beyond the privacy settings they have established. The developer of the app sought permission from those who downloaded it but not their Facebook friends. The app, called “thisisyourdigitallife,” offered personality predictions and billed itself on Facebook as “a research app used by psychologists.”



Read more: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-switch/wp/2018/03/18/facebook-may-have-violated-ftc-privacy-deal-say-former-federal-officials-triggering-risk-of-massive-fines/?utm_term=.0dec17cb769d



If You Don't Know, Now You Know...This Happened in Election 2016 and This Is What Turned The Election...

"In a fantastic profile in The Guardian, Wylie revealed himself to be the architect of the technology that Cambridge Analytica used to develop targeted advertising strategies that arguably helped sway the U.S. presidential election.

A self-described gay, Canadian vegan, Wylie eventually became — as he told The Guardian — the developer of “Steve Bannon’s psychological warfare mindfuck tool.”

The goal, as The Guardian reported, was to combine social media’s reach with big data analytical tools to create psychographic profiles that could then be manipulated in what Bannon and Cambridge Analytica investor Robert Mercer allegedly referred to as a military-style psychological operations campaign — targeting U.S. voters."

https://techcrunch.com/2018/03/18/facebook-has-suspended-the-account-of-the-whistleblower-who-exposed-cambridge-analytica/
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Facebook may have violated FTC privacy deal, say former federal officials... (Original Post) LovingA2andMI Mar 2018 OP
"Many millions of dollars in fines." Chump change for FB, and no deterrent at all. Squinch Mar 2018 #1
Could they also face duforsure Mar 2018 #2
Let's Hope So... LovingA2andMI Mar 2018 #5
Republicons have kept privacy regulations & laws weak compared to Europe and Canada. Bernardo de La Paz Mar 2018 #3
Yep... LovingA2andMI Mar 2018 #6
No republican will have anything to say about this but "fake news" RainCaster Mar 2018 #4
Except... LovingA2andMI Mar 2018 #7
Please read my post from last year about CA neohippie Mar 2018 #8
Thank You... LovingA2andMI Mar 2018 #9
Facebook and the Russian Mafia neohippie Mar 2018 #10
Looks like NCGOP has CA ties too neohippie Mar 2018 #11
+1 dalton99a Mar 2018 #12

LovingA2andMI

(7,006 posts)
5. Let's Hope So...
Mon Mar 19, 2018, 08:12 AM
Mar 2018

And Much More. This story is huge and is the story on why everything that happened in Election 2016, happened.

Bernardo de La Paz

(48,773 posts)
3. Republicons have kept privacy regulations & laws weak compared to Europe and Canada.
Mon Mar 19, 2018, 07:59 AM
Mar 2018

All to benefit the 1% and 0.01% at the expense of the 99%.

neohippie

(1,142 posts)
8. Please read my post from last year about CA
Mon Mar 19, 2018, 09:29 AM
Mar 2018

There's a lot of information about CA in this thread I posted in February 2017



https://www.democraticunderground.com/10028716802


And more from this threads from this past weekend


https://www.democraticunderground.com/10142016046

neohippie

(1,142 posts)
10. Facebook and the Russian Mafia
Mon Mar 19, 2018, 09:50 AM
Mar 2018

There's a lot of interesting Russian ties to Silcon Valley, Facebook, Digital Skies, Zynga -facebook games, Air BNB, Spotify, Slack, and so much more

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/11/05/world/yuri-milner-facebook-twitter-russia.html?mtrref=www.google.com&gwh=DA0D674CBF7C2F13611890CAB2434CCE&gwt=pay


https://www.thenewamerican.com/usnews/politics/item/3286-facebook-are-you-interfacing-with-the-russian-mafia--kgb


Andrey Ternovskiy, one of Russia's wunderkind Internet entrepreneurs, is being courted by venture capitalists the world over. To get access to cash he needn't leave Moscow, but he doesn't want to do business with the billionaire oligarchs tied to the Russian Mafia and Putin's KGB-FSB machine in the Kremlin.

So, earlier this year the 18-year-old founder of Chatroullet, a webcam-based conversation website, came to the United States to meet with investors. Ternovskiy didn't tell anyone his itinerary. Nevertheless, when he arrived in New York, there was a chauffer-driven limo waiting for him, courtesy of Yuri Milner and Digital Sky Technologies (DST), Russia's hottest investment company.

Ternovskiy reportedly has rebuffed DST's efforts, describing them as "harassing and hounding."

Ryan Tate at gawker.com appropriately describes the DST limo episode as "creepy." However, the experience goes beyond "creepy," illustrating the nexus between Russia's "business" community and it's intelligence structures. How did DST know Ternovskiy's flight schedule? There are a number of ways that DST could have gotten that information, nearly all of which would be illegal in any country where the "rule of law" is more than merely an empty slogan. But considering DST's high-level ties to Vladimir Putin's KGB-FSB police-state apparatus, obtaining Ternovskiy's airline itinerary must have been child's play.

The Russian teenager is demonstrating better business sense and greater ethical judgment than American corporations, such as social network behemoth Facebook and Wall Street titan Goldman Sachs. Over the past year, DST has made several large investments in Facebook, and now holds a ten percent share in the company, which boasts more than 500 million users worldwide — and continues to grow at a phenomenal rate.

DST, which has also invested heavily in Zynga, the online social network game developer (FarmVille, FrontierVille, Mafia Wars [above], etc.), and Groupon, a deal-of-the-day website, has a billion dollars to invest in Internet companies and, reportedly, is also looking at buying into Twitter.


https://www.wired.com/2011/10/mf_milner/


Ties to Kushner


https://www.theguardian.com/news/2017/nov/05/russia-funded-facebook-twitter-investments-kushner-investor





he investments were made through a Russian technology magnate, Yuri Milner, who also holds a stake in a company co-owned by Kushner, Donald Trump’s son-in-law and senior White House adviser.

The discovery is likely to stir concerns over Russian influence in US politics and the role played by social media in last year’s presidential election. It may also raise new questions for the social media companies and for Kushner.


Alexander Vershbow, who was a US ambassador to Russia under George W Bush and to Nato under Bill Clinton, said the Russian state institutions were frequently used as “tools for Putin’s pet political projects”.

Vershbow said the findings were concerning in light of efforts by Moscow to disrupt US democracy and public debate. “There clearly was a wider plan, despite Putin’s protestations to the contrary,” he said.


The investments are detailed in the Paradise Papers, a trove of millions of leaked documents reviewed by the Guardian, the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ) and other partners, along with other previously unreported filings.

Facebook and Twitter were not made aware that funding for the investments came from the state-controlled VTB Bank and a financial arm of the state oil and gas firm Gazprom, according to Milner.

The files show that in 2011, VTB funded a $191m investment in Twitter. About the same time, Gazprom Investholding financed an opaque offshore company, which in turn funded a vehicle that held $1bn-worth of Facebook shares.



https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yuri_Milner



https://www.newyorker.com/news/our-columnists/the-poligarchs-oligarchs-and-stooges-of-the-paradise-papers


T
he Paradise Papers have uncovered some of the stooges and their connections to oligarchs. One example is Yuri Milner, a Wharton-educated Russian businessman who once worked for the oil tycoon Mikhail Khodorkovsky, an oligarch who rejected the mafia-state bargain and lost his fortune, spent ten years in prison, and now lives in exile. Milner started making money through Russian tech investments in the aughts, and by 2009 he was investing in American high-tech companies. He has since become a Silicon Valley fixture and a bit of a science-and-technology celebrity (he founded the Breakthrough Prizes, which offer the biggest cash payout of any science prize in the world). The Paradise Papers expose Milner as a stooge of Alisher Usmanov, an oligarch who has enjoyed most-favored status under Putin. Some of the money for Milner’s investments in Facebook came from Gazprom Investholding, which is the finance arm of the Russian state gas monopoly, Gazprom; at the time, Usmanov ran Gazprom Investholding.
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