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Facebook Allowed a Chinese Firm Deemed a 'National Security Threat' to Access Personal Data
by Cody Fenwick via jan - Alternet Tuesday, Jun 5 2018, 10:07pm
international / prose / post

It is little wonder that CIA shaped and supported Facebook is manic about mining personal data. It's myopic view of what is good for the company (and the CIA) without any regard whatsoever for its users' privacy would eventually see it fail or at least LEARN. The world's leading IT company, Apple, has now released an app/feature which prevents Facebook from surreptitiously mining personal data from iPhones. Other major IT companies would soon follow suite as Apple leads the market place by simply exploiting obvious user wishes -- that simple.

Facebook's scandalous handling of private user data somehow keeps getting worse.

A new report from the New York Times on Tuesday revealed that the social media company allowed several Chinese device manufacturers to access the personal data of users and users' friends without their knowledge — including one firm, the telecommunications company Huawei, which has close ties to the ruling party in China and has been deemed a national security threat by the United States.

The data-sharing agreement Facebook had with Huawei, as well as at least three other Chinese companies, is similar to that which it had with Amazon, Apple, BlackBerry, and Samsung. The Timeson Sunday revealed those data-sharing relationships, which Facebook defended by saying — implausibly — that it considered those companies "extensions of Facebook."

The partnerships allowed the devices to access information from "users and all of their friends — including work and education history, relationship status and likes."

In a statement to the newspaper, Facebook insisted that the information given to Huawei stayed on the devices that people used to access Facebook, and this information wasn't sent back to the company. However, it's not obvious Facebook could be certain about this, and the fact that these relationships remained undisclosed for so long raises questions about the company's trustworthiness.

“I look forward to learning more about how Facebook ensured that information about their users was not sent to Chinese servers,” Sen. Mark Warner (D-VA) told the Times.

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