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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, 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.