While it doesn’t seem to bother most Facebook users that their intimate personal data is being compiled to sell them stuff (and establish global hegemony), it did stir the waters of public perception when profile information was utilized by law-enforcement agencies to spy on protesters in Oakland, Baltimore and Ferguson.
Last week, Facebook made a pledge to halt the practice of selling data used to keep tabs on activists and protesters. But a closer look reveals a clever legal and public-relations maneuver to cover their corporate arses and cloak this profitable practice in contractual darkness.
Policing Facebook
As far as we know, Facebook doesn’t sell data directly to the police. Mainly, this is because the police don’t have the Big Data chops to do anything tech savvy on their own. Companies like Media Sonar, Snaptrends and Geofeedia pay Facebook and other companies for access to profile data that they repackage through their sophisticated APIs and broker off to law enforcement.
A surveillance company can see who is a Black Lives Matter protester or a Muslim, or who has “liked” anti-police Facebook pages.
When this practice came to light last year, Facebook received considerable pushback from the ACLU, the press and activist groups. In October 2016, the ACLU (along with the Center for Media Justice and Color of Change) wrote this letter to Facebook and Instagram, asking the social media juggernauts to end the chilling practices enabled by social media monitoring.
Paying to access the same profile data that allows marketing companies to target potential customers with pinpoint accuracy, a surveillance company can see who is a Black Lives Matter protester or a Muslim, or who has “liked” anti-police Facebook pages. Combined with additional information combed from multiple sources beyond Facebook, these feeds become robust tools to effectively monitor political movements from the inside.Oh, the good times J. Edgar Hoover would have had!
Facebook’s user policies have long prohibited this sort of use. But until the recent outcry from lawyers, activists and the press, Facebook never enforced their own standards.
Facebook puts the kibosh on social media monitoring
When a bunch of bad-ass civil-liberty lawyers ask you to stop violating civil liberties, even a behemoth like Facebook takes pause. And the big news is that Facebook announced it won’t be passive about it any longer.
In a heroic-sounding message from Rob Sherman, deputy chief privacy [or lack thereof] officer at Facebook, notes that “[t]oday we are adding language to our Facebook and Instagram platform policies to more clearly explain that developers cannot use data obtained from us to provide tools that are used for surveillance.”
Public pressure — game, set, match.
Keep private your secret key
Or maybe the Facebook legal team figured out a sneaky way to aid, abet and profit without taking the blame?
Oh, wait. Here it is, explicitly stated in their policy for developers:
“Keep private your secret key and access tokens. You can share them with an agent acting to operate your app if they sign a confidentiality agreement.
If you use any partner services, make them sign a contract to protect any information you obtained from us, limit their use of that information, and keep it confidential.”
Keep it classy...keep it confidential
To paraphrase Facebook: Do not contract directly with us to do your unsightly surveillance work. Contract with another company. Or form an innocuous-seeming shell company. Secure clandestine access from a middleman. Whatever you do, make sure you have an airtight confidentiality agreement so the ACLU doesn’t go after us. Because when you get caught violating our terms (and you will), then we can reasonably argue we didn’t know you were doing it. Because we told you not to tell us.
The revolution will not be Facebook-ized
If you, informed reader, are a potential target of surveillance, it’s best to start seeding Facebook (and your other social media accounts) with red herrings to see where they leak out to. This will possibly allow you to reverse-engineer the flow of information — from law-enforcement action to surveillance contractor to shell company and right on back to Facebook. Or better yet, stop organizing on privacy-hating Facebook. The revolution will not be televised and — newsflash!—it’s not gonna be on Facebook either.
