Facebook reinstates data firm it suspended for alleged misuse, but surveillance questions linger

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Crimson Hexagon, a Boston (MA) data analytics company, raised some eyebrows recently when it announced that its access to the firehose of user data from Facebook and Instagram had been reinstated—after being suspended and investigated by the social media giant for alleged misuse of data for surveillance purposes. The reinstatement, which began earlier in Aug, followed “several weeks of constructive discussion and information exchange,” said Dan Shore, Crimson’s chief financial officer. But the companies didn’t specify the results of the inquiry or explain why access was restored, raising more questions about how Facebook and other platforms police third parties like Cambridge Analytica and Crimson Hexagon. Crimson boasts of having gathered the largest public repository of social media data, which it has used in work for clients that include Adidas and Anheuser-Busch InBev, as well as the Department of Homeland Security, the State Department, and clients in Turkey and Russia, including a Russian nonprofit with ties to the Kremlin. 

In March 2017, Facebook followed Twitter’s lead and added language to its Platform Policy that specifically prohibited developers from using Facebook data “to provide tools that are used for surveillance,” though it didn’t specify how it defined surveillance. The policy puts Facebook in a tough position. Even if Crimson Hexagon were have found to be in violation of Facebook’s policies, shutting down its access could be a death knell for a billion dollar data industry, made of startups and large defense contractors who relationships with Facebook and other services are crucial to government and commercial clients. “To lock down what is publicly available and ingested through an API would put social listening and analytics into a tailspin,” said Kieley Taylor, managing partner and global head of social at advertising agency GroupM. “T]he precedent of going deeper into the contracts when the data appears to be captured in the right way is troubling. It’s also unclear to me how this would be broadly enforced.”


Facebook reinstates data firm it suspended for alleged misuse, but surveillance questions linger