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from the ignorance-is-bliss...until-it-isn't dept.
Sen. Mark Warner, shown here in 2018, said Wednesday that he's drafting legislation to require major tech platforms to get informed consent from users whose data is collected in market research.
After a year of asking Facebook to explain its approach to privacy, at least two US senators still have questions.
Sen. Mark Warner, a Democrat from Virginia, and Sen. Edward Markey, a Democrat from Massachusetts, each took the company to task Wednesday in light of reports that it paid teens as young as 13 to download an app that could track their every action on their phones.
In separate press releases, the senators pointed to growing frustration with the social media giant for not being clear about its data collection practices. For his part, Warner said he is drafting a bill to require major companies to get informed consent from users whose data becomes the target of market research.
"I have concerns that users were not appropriately informed about the extent of Facebook's data-gathering and the commercial purposes of this data collection," Warner wrote in a letter to Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg.
Facebook didn't immediately respond to a request for comment. But a spokesperson told CNET earlier Wednesday that Facebook didn't share the data it collected and users knew what they were signing up for. Less than 5 percent of the users were teens and all signed parental consent forms, the spokesperson said.
Warner also asked Facebook for a fuller accounting of how it came to approve the apps, which had deep access to track activity on mobile phones, including apps that Facebook was competing with.
Markey took issue with the ethics of targeting teens with an offer they might not have the maturity to access.
"It is inherently manipulative to offer teens money in exchange for their personal information when younger users don't have a clear understanding how much data they're handing over and how sensitive it is," he said.
(Score: 2) by Snotnose on Friday February 01 2019, @01:05AM (3 children)
Force FB to knock this shit the fuck off. Having a nice platform to keep track of my friends and family should not mean you know every fucking detail of my life.
Sounds to me FB needs to increase their "contributions" to the Senators, as it stands in our current environment it's not enough.
/ not saying Congress is for sale
// ha ha
/// Congress has been for sale for decades now
When the dust settled America realized it was saved by a porn star.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday February 01 2019, @01:35AM (2 children)
You are so helpless that you need the (not even state, but federal) government to stop you from using facebook and doing something else where your privacy is respected? And you must really expect that whatever the government does will actually help you instead of make things more expensive and more difficult for competition who could offer what you want?
I cannot understand this mindset at all, it is completely alien to me. It is like you live in an entirely different world.
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Friday February 01 2019, @09:02AM (1 child)
They also collection information on non-useds (i.e. people who do not allow themselves to be used by Facebook) via shadow profiles. If you don't use a bunch of additional tools such as uMatrix, Facebook is still going to collect data about you. Not to mention, any data they do get will inevitably end up in the hands of government, meaning that it is not purely a problem with corporations. Corporations and governments work hand-in-hand to violate people's rights. You're not going to see any serious efforts to curtail private mass surveillance until governments are reigned in and forced to work for The People. Even the GDPR is rather weak.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday February 01 2019, @02:35PM
Governments are reigned in by giving them less money and power, not more.