Facebook Points Fingers at Other Companies Over Data Breach

• Facebook released a blog post detailing how the service collects information about its users from the web.
• Facebook product management director pointed fingers at popular services like Twitter, Pinterest, and LinkedIn accusing them of supplying data to third parties.
• The blog post failed to answer if the platform constructs shadow profiles for targeted ads.

Facebook released a blog post today detailing its practices and answering how it gathers information from its users around the web. The blog was posted by Facebook product management director David Baser. He wrote Twitter, Pinterest and LinkedIn use similar like and share buttons like Facebook do to help people share various things on these services.

Image Courtesy of ABC News

Google has a proprietary analytics service and companies like Amazon, Twitter and Google also offer login features. These brands are known for advertising services and most websites send the same information as the social media service does each time a user visits them.

Baser went on to speak about what data Facebook collects from its users. It includes cookies, IP address and browser info from other websites. The blog failed to address several key issues about Mark Zuckerburg’s hearing and simply expressed that the brand is tired of being singled out. It feels like a petty attempt to justify the data breach instead of answering topics like ‘shadow profiles’ that was brought up by Senators in the hearing.

Baser mentioned that even if a person does not have a Facebook account or is logged out of his account, the information is still collected by the web browser. Many websites offer similar services that involve data collection and Facebook is one of them as well.

The blog mentioned how other tech companies have gotten off light. However, that claim debatable because companies like Apple or Google are not responsible for anything done by third-party developers on their mobile platforms.

The Cambridge Analytica scandal arose due to the social media platform being unable to enforce its privacy policies that prevent developers from selling or sharing personal data of Facebook users. It is yet to be seen if Apple and Google update their privacy policies to police developers better. Facebook is likely to update its privacy policies soon after the backlash. A final verdict on the controversy is yet to be reached and Senators have proposed much stricter data control and data protection policies to be put in place.