An internal Facebook document has leaked, showing that the management of private data within the social network is very difficult to manage…
Facebook (Meta) and the private data of its users, it’s a long and rather chaotic story. We will of course remember the Cambridge Analytica scandal in 2018, but Mark Zuckerberg’s social network is regularly heckled on this subject, as certain practices are pointed out or the laws of different countries oblige Meta to be more transparent or rigorous.
This is, moreover, the starting point of a internal report produced in 2021 by Facebook’s privacy engineers and released today by Motherboard (Engadget).
Difficult to adapt to local laws
Increasingly, governments are passing laws to regulate the use of private data on the internet. In Europe, for example, we have GDPR, but local constraints are increasing: there is the Privacy Act in the United States, but also new protections that have been put in place in various Asian countries (South Korea, India, Thailand) or even in South Africa or in Egypt. For Facebookit is a real ” tsunami » new constraints.
Also, the report in question sounds the alarm:we do not have an adequate level of control and explainability over how our systems use data and therefore cannot properly effect policy changes […] such as ‘we will not use X data for Y purposes’. Yet this is exactly what regulators expect of us“. For the authors of this report,this increases the risk of errors and misrepresentations ».
A drop of ink in the ocean?
According to this report, Facebook’s main problem is the lack of compartmentalization of the various private data collected. All data collected, whether by Facebook or by a third party and whether sensitive or not, is mixed. “If we can’t list all the data we have – where it is, where it goes, how it’s used – then how can we make commitments about it to the outside world? ».
To illustrate the problem, the authors of the report compare this to a bottle of ink (private data) poured into a lake of water (the network “open data” From Facebook). «How do I put this ink back in the bottle? How to organize it again so that it only flows in authorized places in the lake? ».
In other words, Facebook will be forced, in the coming years, to completely review the operation of its architecture in order to avoid new scandals, or worse still for the company, sanctions from governments.
To follow us, we invite you to download our Android and iOS app. You can read our articles, files, and watch our latest YouTube videos.