[kictanet] Facebook, Twitter and Instagram Share Data with Location-based Social Media Surveillance Startup

Thu Oct 13 21:20:35 EAT 2016

I certainly understand the cynicism about corporations in general, and the human rights activist in me is always secretly pleased to have companies held to account, but I'm hard pressed to divine the logic of this.

Leaving aside the ethics of this-Facebook is a company whose substantial market capitalization and considerable revenue depend on people trusting us with their data. As many in this group know, some from personal experience, we come under considerable fire globally, up to and including law suits and the arrest of employees, because of our efforts to vigorously combat being compelled to turn over data that is not lawfully requested by law enforcement.

So is the charge that we would, despite all of the foregoing, create a scheme to sell user data to this company to pass on to the police? To what end? From a revenue perspective, is it logical that we would refuse to sell data to massive corporations, who would pay multiples of millions of dollars/Ksh to have the data we hold, but we would choose instead to sell to this company, for the express purpose of having them send data to the police?

I am curious to learn more about the logic here.

Ebele Okobi | Public Policy Director, Africa
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10 Brock Street | London<x-apple-data-detectors://0/1> | NW1 3FG
ebeleokobi at fb.com<mailto:ebeleokobi at fb.com>

[6F376569-CC77-422B-BAD3-794055B1E02B]

On Oct 13, 2016, at 1:23 PM, Mwendwa Kivuva via kictanet <kictanet at lists.kictanet.or.ke<mailto:kictanet at lists.kictanet.or.ke>> wrote:

Geofeedia, as it is alleged, was using publicly available user information to sell to law enforcement agents. We would certainly not know if Geofeedia had a commercial agreement with these social media platform to share data, including private data. We can only rely on the communiqué coming from the social media platforms. I would swallow my head if they incriminate themselves.

But the kink of the matter is how privacy and data protection has become a big issue in our times. We the users have put ourselves in a position where we share so much online, without considering the consequences. Apart from privacy settings, and encryption, the social media platforms have no control on the PUBLIC data we post on their platforms. Even without Geofeedia, the security agents can still have bots, even human data entry operators scoring publicly accessible data from the forums.

We are well advised.

______________________
Mwendwa Kivuva, Nairobi, Kenya
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On 13 October 2016 at 13:26, Harry Delano via kictanet <kictanet at lists.kictanet.or.ke<mailto:kictanet at lists.kictanet.or.ke>> wrote:
Hey Ebele,

That sounds like another "sneaky"‎ case of getting caught with hands in the cookie jar. How long did this go on before you could flag it up..? Did it have to await feedback from a third party for Fb to realize this, or are there internal controls and checks to monitor what each of the API's are feeding into or collecting from the huge amount of data available..?

Some clarity would suffice..

Regards,
Harry

Sent from my BlackBerry 10 smartphone
From: Ebele Okobi via kictanet
Sent: Wednesday, October 12, 2016 20:57
To: Harry Delano
Reply To: KICTAnet ICT Policy Discussions
Cc: Ebele Okobi
Subject: Re: [kictanet] Facebook, Twitter and Instagram Share Data with Location-based Social Media Surveillance Startup

Yes-this is a mess, and this article isn't an accurate report. Basically-this was a private company that set itself up as a developer-same as, say, Candy Crush makers or those quiz things about your friends on FB. As a developer, it got access to API (see here  http://readwrite.com/2013/09/19/api-defined/<https://urldefense.proofpoint.com/v2/url?u=http-3A__readwrite.com_2013_09_19_api-2Ddefined_&d=DQMFaQ&c=5VD0RTtNlTh3ycd41b3MUw&r=ArvepG4_wcNu_X9xi3nb_Xa9WsGLVfmK6mwPdVONOTE&m=mqf7Qs62RwA5ECp0SG8_B1G7LykNnlkJwTr6gEHU4Jc&s=8fUYx3yHaCiLuX7p14nQkTBHoQJhxgFV4dlm-vmEkbU&e=> for definition) that allowed it to build programs into FB. This allowed it to write programs targeting publicly available information on FB platform. That means-no private chats, no private groups, no data that users haven't made publicly available. The point of APIs in this context is SUPPOSED to be so advertisers (from small business to nonprofits to Andela, etc.) can send ads to targeted users. This group completely violated our policies and used their API access to target publicly available info to send to police. FB has kicked them off our platform. As you can imagine, there are many conversations now about this. But key to know that FB did NOT and does not sell user data; that this was a completely unauthorized use of our developer platform, that  we rectified this as soon as we were notified, that the access was not to user data, but essentially a program that allowed them to target public info on Facebook. It's still unacceptable, and something we are taking extremely seriously.

Ebele Okobi | Public Policy Director, Africa
m. +44 (0) 771 156 1315<tel:+44%20(0)%20771%20156%201315>
10 Brock Street | London | NW1 3FG
ebeleokobi at fb.com<mailto:ebeleokobi at fb.com>

[6F376569-CC77-422B-BAD3-794055B1E02B]

On Oct 12, 2016, at 5:43 PM, Ahmed Mohamed Maawy via kictanet <kictanet at lists.kictanet.or.ke<mailto:kictanet at lists.kictanet.or.ke>> wrote:

The ACLU of California has obtained records showing that Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram provided user data access to Geofeedia, a developer of a social media monitoring product that we have seen marketed to law enforcement as a tool to monitor activists and protesters. We are pleased that after we reported our findings to the companies, Instagram cut off Geofeedia’s access to public user posts, and Facebook has cut its access to a topic-based feed of public user posts.

More here: https://www.aclu.org/blog/free-future/facebook-instagram-and-twitter-provided-data-access-surveillance-product-marketed<https://urldefense.proofpoint.com/v2/url?u=https-3A__www.aclu.org_blog_free-2Dfuture_facebook-2Dinstagram-2Dand-2Dtwitter-2Dprovided-2Ddata-2Daccess-2Dsurveillance-2Dproduct-2Dmarketed&d=DQMFaQ&c=5VD0RTtNlTh3ycd41b3MUw&r=ArvepG4_wcNu_X9xi3nb_Xa9WsGLVfmK6mwPdVONOTE&m=GhVvdCFxDu4EVUb8ylng2LCvR_0IBt5-yhOx6fQy7Ss&s=G0SoSpLD_f-qRWCjjSMY5s9GRO2y2wlRmg_ch_J_Tms&e=>

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