Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:
Facebook on Thursday filed a lawsuit in federal court against OneAudience, claiming the New Jersey-based analytics company paid developers to install a malicious software development kit in their apps that could later be used to improperly harvest user data from the social network.
In the lawsuit, Facebook alleges that OneAudience paid developers, sometimes shopping and game app makers, to include the SDK in their apps, some of which were distributed on the Google Play store. When a user installed and logged into one of the apps, the SDK allowed OneAudience to collect information, Facebook says.
The harvested information included names, email addresses, locales, time zones, Facebook IDs and sometimes gender information, Facebook said.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by black6host on Sunday March 01 2020, @11:01AM (5 children)
I read the article, it was pretty light on what exactly was malicious about the software that Facebook doesn't already do with it's apps. I get that it harvest user data, so does damn near everything else these days. Truly I think the issue is that Facebook is protective of the data it holds reign over and that this is nothing more than part of the constant struggle to retain power.
(Score: 5, Informative) by canopic jug on Sunday March 01 2020, @11:43AM
Indeed. I thought the title would be more accurate as, "Facebook Sues Analytics Firm for Allegedly Using Harvested Data". The data was already there, it was already harvested by Facebook which went as far as making it available via an API. The firm that Facebook is trying to shift blame towards has simply been using the API, which Facebook set up, to access the data, which Facebook has made great efforts and expense to collect: An API exists to provide access. If Facebook's protests here were anything more than pure noise and distraction, they would have limited the API's access or, truly, not harvested the data in the first place. However, not harvesting data goes against Facebook's main business model which is that of mass manipulation of opinion. Not harvesting the data would also go against the secondary and tertiary businsess models, too, that of data mining (and selling access to mined data) and that of advertising.
Money is not free speech. Elections should not be auctions.
(Score: 5, Touché) by maxwell demon on Sunday March 01 2020, @02:11PM (2 children)
Just read the summary carefully:
Thus Facebook doesn't sue them for harvesting data, they sue them for doing it improperly. Which probably means "through means that don't involve money flowing towards Apple".
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
(Score: 3, Informative) by maxwell demon on Sunday March 01 2020, @02:12PM (1 child)
Damn, the last word of this should of course have been "Facebook"!
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
(Score: 2) by Gaaark on Sunday March 01 2020, @02:35PM
Or you could have, ironically, called it "Facepalm"! :)
--- Please remind me if I haven't been civil to you: I'm channeling MDC. ---Gaaark 2.0 ---
(Score: 2) by FatPhil on Monday March 02 2020, @11:01AM
App requests user data through facebook's api.
Facebook gives app user data.
Who *really* was responsible for the user data getting out?
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