Online privacy

Apple is revamping privacy controls for its devices and cloud services to comply with strict new European rules as Facebook faces a user privacy backlash. The iPhone maker said it will update its web page for managing Apple IDs in coming months to let users download a copy of all their data stored with the company. The site will also let customers correct personal information, temporarily deactivate their account, and completely delete it.

Cambridge Analytica’s US campaign data, which was harvested from Facebook, is still circulating – despite assurances it has been deleted. The cache of campaign data from a Cambridge Analytica source, details 136,000 individuals in the US state of Colorado, along with each person’s personality and psychological profile. The data, which dates from 2014, was used by Cambridge Analytica to target specific messages at residents who would be most susceptible to them.

As the Federal Communications Commission in the Trump era dismantles vital rules protecting net neutrality and users’ privacy, Americans need an internet provider that they can trust and is accountable to the public, not profits.

By now, most consumers understand that data collection is a core part of advertising-based businesses such as Facebook, Google and Snapchat. The practice can often be a boon to consumers: The more people share with the companies, the better they are able to serve up ads, search results, product recommendations and music and movie suggestions tailored to an individual's liking. Yet many remain unaware of the type of data collected and what companies ultimately do with it. While the answers often lie in privacy policies and terms of service agreements, few take the time to look them over.

Facebook is curbing the information that it exchanges with companies that collect and sell consumer data for advertisers. The measures affect a group of so-called data brokers such as Acxiom Corp. and Oracle Data Cloud, formerly known as DataLogix, that gather shopping and other information on consumers that Facebook for years has incorporated into the ad-targeting system that is at the core of its business.

Cambridge Analytica and SCL were the subject of a number of previously unpublished harassment complaints filed in response to the numerous political survey and messaging calls made on behalf of US campaigns between 2013 and 2017.

Can a US technology company refuse to honor a court-ordered US search warrant seeking information that is stored at a facility outside the United States? Oral arguments in a pending case took place at the Supreme Court in February 2018, and they did not go well for Microsoft, the tech giant that is challenging a warrant for information stored at its facility in Ireland.

As a start-up called Cambridge Analytica sought to harvest the Facebook data of tens of millions of Americans in summer 2014, the company received help from at least one employee at Palantir Technologies, a top Silicon Valley contractor to American spy agencies and the Pentagon. It was a Palantir employee in London, working closely with the data scientists building Cambridge’s psychological profiling technology, who suggested the scientists create their own app — a mobile-phone-based personality quiz — to gain access to Facebook users’ friend networks. Cambridge ultimately took a similar ap

Amid public concerns over Cambridge Analytica’s use of Facebook data and a subsequent movement to encourage users to abandon Facebook, there is a renewed focus on how social media companies collect personal information and make it available to marketers.  While there is evidence that social media works in some important ways for people, Pew Research Center studies have shown that people are anxious about all the personal information that is collected and shared and the security of their data.

Facebook has been rocked by reports of a massive data scrape carried out by Cambridge Analytica and one of its then-contractors, a Cambridge University academic named Aleksandr Kogan. Kogan claims that the data he collected from thousands of Facebook users and their friends—amounting to data on over 50 million users—abided by Facebook’s terms; Cambridge Analytica promises it deleted the data; and Facebook is auditing everyone it can for signs of the data. But while Facebook provided the original data, it wasn’t the only vehicle for Kogan’s app.