Once more it seems now that Facebook has been playing fast and loose with the personal data of those who are members of the social media platform. The latest revelation in a string of concerns raised over the past three months is that the company founded by Mark Zuckerberg shared personal data of members with at least 60 manufacturers of smart phones. The accusation also says that Facebook enabled the mobile phone manufacturers to access users’ friends’ data without first obtaining explicit consent.
For the record, Facebook is denying that the sharing of the information amounted to an actual data breach and says the circumstances are “very different” from those involved in the recent Cambridge Analytica scandal in which data was used for a different purpose.
In the latest incident, Facebook says the information provided only enabled the mobile phone companies to offer mobile subscription services, and it denies that the details were stored on those firms’ own servers.
Certainly, it would seem that Facebook has not abided by reasonable privacy protection standards. That is disappointing. What is clear now is that Facebook’s data protection policies — at least not in nations covered by the European Union’s new General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) — falls short, and the company has shared users’ information for the sole purpose of improving its bottom line.
There is a need for nations to adopt stringent privacy policies similar to GDPR to prevent and impose punitive measures for ad hoc data sharing. And it’s time too that corporate regulators in the US and the European Union looked long and hard at Facebook’s business model. Maybe, it’s simply too big now to remain a single unit.
