Under The Angsana Tree: Why is Facebook in trouble?

Update 28 Oct 2021: Zuckerberg vows metaverse will have privacy, parental controls

Mr Mark Zuckerberg, the chief executive officer of Meta, formerly called Facebook, pledged that the metaverse, the futuristic immersive reality platform he envisions for the coming decade, will have privacy standards, parental controls and disclosures about data use that his social network has famously lacked.

Speaking during the live-streamed Connect event on Thursday (Oct 28), he gave examples of privacy and safety controls that would be needed in the metaverse, such as the ability to block someone from appearing in your space.

Mr Zuckerberg is betting that the metaverse will be the next big computing platform, calling it "the successor to the mobile Internet".

related: What is the metaverse?

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Facebook Won’t Read Your Messages

WhatsApp has introduced it’s new privacy policy. It basically says that the company will be sharing data with Facebook and that users will have till 8 February 2021 to agree on the new terms. If they don’t agree with this new policy, they’ll no longer be able to use Whatsapp.

This has obviously got many people understandably worried, thinking that the app would be able to access your private messages and send them to Facebook.

However, the company has stepped in to clear things up. On 12 Jan, WhatsApp released a tweet regarding some of these concerns:

WhatsApp cannot see your private messages or hear your calls and neither can Facebook.
The app keeps logs of who everyone is messaging or calling.
It cannot see your shared location and neither can Facebook.
WhatsApp does not share your contacts with Facebook.
Group chats remain private.
You can set your messages to disappear.
You can download your data.

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Video: CNET News

Facebook grilled by Singapore lawmakers on Cambridge Analytica during tense parliamentary session

Representatives from Google, Facebook and Twitter at the the parliamentary session. Photo: Screengrab from CNA

Singapore’s Select Committee on Deliberate Online Falsehoods convened on Thursday to hear representatives from Google, Facebook and Twitter give oral evidence during one of the parliamentary sessions on how they are combating fake news.

The tech giants, together with industry association Asia Internet Coalition, in their written representation to the committee before the session, had stated that they firmly do not believe that legislation by governments will help stop the spread of fake news.

Instead, according to Channel NewsAsia, they called for a stringent self-regulatory approach, executed in coordination and cooperation with the authorities to fight the bad actors who intend to spread misinformation.

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K Shanmugam presses Facebook on lack of transparency over Cambridge Analytica saga

Law and Home Affairs Minister K Shanmugam questioned Facebook in Parliament on Thursday (22 March) on why the social media giant had not been open when it first found out about a massive breach of its user data arising from the Cambridge Analytica (CA) saga.

Shanmugam’s pointed questions directed at Simon Milner, Facebook’s vice-president of public policy for Asia-Pacific, during the hearing for the Select Committee on Deliberate Online Falsehoods come after media reports in the past week revealed that personal data of 50 million Facebook users were obtained by CA, a UK analytics firm, in part to help Donald Trump in his 2016 US presidential election campaign.

In 2014, CA hired a researcher, Aleksandr Kogan, to gather basic profile information of Facebook users along with what they chose to “Like.” Some 270,000 Facebook users downloaded Kogan’s app and the researcher was able to collect data of 50 million people

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Cambridge Analytica responds to Facebook announcement

Cambridge Analytica fully complies with Facebook’s terms of service and is currently in touch with Facebook following its recent statement that it had suspended the company from its platform, in order to resolve this matter as quickly as possible.

Cambridge Analytica's Commercial and Political divisions use social media platforms for outward marketing, delivering data-led and creative content to targeted audiences. They do not use or hold data from Facebook profiles.

In 2014, we contracted a company led by a seemingly reputable academic at an internationally-renowned institution to undertake a large scale research project in the United States.

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#DeleteFacebook grows in support

Facebook is at the centre of a scandal over hijacked personal data

As Facebook reels from the scandal over hijacked personal data, a movement to quit it has gathered momentum, getting a boost from a high-profile co-founder of the WhatsApp messaging service acquired by the huge social network in 2014.

“It is time. #deletefacebook,” Brian Acton said in a tweet, using the hashtag protesting the handling of the crisis by the world’s biggest social network.

The WhatsApp co-founder, who now works at rival messaging application Signal, posted the comment amid a growing uproar over revelations that Facebook data was harvested by a British political consulting firm linked to Donald Trump’s presidential campaign.

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Spotlight shines on Mark Zuckerberg in Cambridge Analytica scandal

Calls are mounting for Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg to personally take charge of one of the biggest crises to befall the social network as regulatory bodies on both sides of the Atlantic clamour for answers in a data scandal which threatens to engulf it.

Zuckerberg has thus far remained tight-lipped amidst reports that the user data of up to 50m individuals had been misused by Cambridge Analytica, which utilized this unauthorized information to help promote Donald Trump in the US election.

This data was harvested by University of Cambridge professor Aleksandr Kogan who created a personality app that harvested such data which he could then sell on to third parties.

related: Mark Zuckerberg: 'If we can’t protect you, we don’t deserve to serve you'

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New, 'prescriptive' laws not the ideal solution against online falsehoods: Social media, Internet giants in written submissions

Representatives of Google, Twitter, Facebook and industry association Asia Internet Coalition at the public hearing by the Select Committee on Deliberate Online Falsehoods on Mar 22, 2018

In addressing the issue of fake news, new prescriptive laws are not an ideal solution, according to industry association Asia Internet Coalition (AIC), whose members include social media companies like Google, Facebook and Twitter. Instead, a “stringent self-regulatory approach”, executed in coordination and cooperation with the authorities, will have a better outcome.

The association made this point in its written representation to the Select Committee on Deliberate Online Falsehoods. It gave oral evidence to the committee on Thursday (Mar 22), together with representatives from Google, Facebook and Twitter.

Explaining its rationale, AIC’s managing director Jeff Paine said in his written representation that prescriptive legislation will not adequately address the issue effectively, due to the highly subjective, nuanced and difficult task of discerning whether information is true or false.

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Revealed: 50 million Facebook profiles harvested for Cambridge Analytica in major data breach

Cambridge Analytica whistleblower: 'We spent $1m harvesting millions of Facebook profiles' – video

The data analytics firm that worked with Donald Trump’s election team and the winning Brexit campaign harvested millions of Facebook profiles of US voters, in one of the tech giant’s biggest ever data breaches, and used them to build a powerful software program to predict and influence choices at the ballot box.

A whistleblower has revealed to the Observer how Cambridge Analytica – a company owned by the hedge fund billionaire Robert Mercer, and headed at the time by Trump’s key adviser Steve Bannon – used personal information taken without authorisation in early 2014 to build a system that could profile individual US voters, in order to target them with personalised political advertisements.

Christopher Wylie, who worked with a Cambridge University academic to obtain the data, told the Observer: “We exploited Facebook to harvest millions of people’s profiles. And built models to exploit what we knew about them and target their inner demons. That was the basis the entire company was built on.”

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Facebook gave data about 57bn friendships to academic

Aleksandr Kogan has accused Facebook of using him as a scapegoat. Composite: Guardian Design Team

Before Facebook suspended Aleksandr Kogan from its platform for the data harvesting “scam” at the centre of the unfolding Cambridge Analytica scandal, the social media company enjoyed a close enough relationship with the researcher that it provided him with an anonymised, aggregate dataset of 57bn Facebook friendships.

Facebook provided the dataset of “every friendship formed in 2011 in every country in the world at the national aggregate level” to Kogan’s University of Cambridge laboratory for a study on international friendships published in Personality and Individual Differences in 2015. Two Facebook employees were named as co-authors of the study, alongside researchers from Cambridge, Harvard and the University of California, Berkeley. Kogan was publishing under the name Aleksandr Spectre at the time.

A University of Cambridge press release on the study’s publication noted that the paper was “the first output of ongoing research collaborations between Spectre’s lab in Cambridge and Facebook”. Facebook did not respond to queries about whether any other collaborations occurred.

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DELETING FACEBOOK? HERE ARE THE BEST ALTERNATIVES FOR WHAT YOU'LL MISS

If you're ready to quit Facebook, here's how to replace everything you might miss.
BY NOW, YOU'RE probably aware of the hurricane tearing its way through Facebook. Over the weekend, both The Guardian and The New York Times published explosive reports about the improper use of data belonging to 50 million Facebook users by Trump campaign-affiliated data firm Cambridge Analytica.

The incident is the most high-profile misuse of Facebook's systems to become public, but it's far from the only one. Russian propagandists slipped through Facebook's advertising safeguards to try to influence the 2016 presidential election. In 2014, the social network allowed academics to use the News Feed to tinker with users' emotions. The United Nations even said earlier this month that Facebook played a role in exacerbating the genocide of the Rohingya people in Myanmar. Facebook itself has admitted that mindlessly scrolling on its platform isn't good for you.

If all that has you thinking about deleting Facebook entirely, you're far from alone. (Quitting the social network is also somewhat of a first-world privilege, since for many people Facebook functions as the entire internet itself.) But going cold turkey can be hard; Facebook actually provides useful services sometimes, and there's no one-for-one replacement.

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Boycotting digital monopolies like Facebook is harder than it seems

You may have heard of the #DeleteFacebook campaign, but you, like me, are probably among the vast majority of Facebook’s nearly 2 billion users who probably won’t actually follow through. CEO Mark Zuckerberg even has the data to prove it, telling The New York Times yesterday that he hasn’t seen a “meaningful number of people” deleting their accounts.

Amid the ongoing data privacy scandal surrounding the Trump-connected firm Cambridge Analytica, tech critics and users alike are revisiting the concept of leaving Facebook and extracting ourselves from one of the world’s most pervasive advertising empires. The decision to delete Facebook boils down to two questions: 1. Has Facebook lost the necessary trust to be a steward of our personal information? And 2. Is the company’s grip on online and offline life too great to ever reasonably walk away from?

The answer to the first question is probably yes, while the answer to the second is even more grim: for most of us in 2018, Facebook feels too big to leave. No other company in history, besides perhaps Google, has claimed so many users across this vast a digital footprint. And unlike Google, Facebook, has no legitimate competition when it comes to the primary services it provides. In effect, Facebook is a monopoly: it owns huge swaths of online life, to the point that even Zuckerberg now agrees that maybe it’s time it should be regulated by the federal government.

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Should you delete Facebook?

Following the certifiable shitshow at Facebook around revelations that data firm Cambridge Analytica harvested and exploited users’ data without their permission, many users declared they were through with the platform. The hashtag #deletefacebook spread rapidly on Twitter (another social network that uses targeted advertising and was exploited by Russians), with people from all sides of the political spectrum raising concerns about security, privacy, the company’s influence on democracy, and its lack of transparency. Others talked about how deleting Facebook made them happier humans.

All of these reasons are legitimate and understandable. But, for many, quitting Facebook might be a tall order—and that is perfectly understandable as well. The platform has been in many people’s lives for over a decade, becoming the one place on the internet where they can find and connect with everyone they’ve ever known. It’s a massive trove of memories, and a digital passport of sorts (not to mention its uses for work and business).

If you’re fed up with the company’s antics, but feel either tethered to its services, or genuinely enjoy some of its aspects, here we weigh the pros and cons of bidding adieu to Mark Zuckerberg’s dormroom creation:

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Facebook, Google warn Singapore against 'fake news' law

Internet giants Facebook and Google on Thursday warned Singapore against introducing new laws to combat "fake news", saying that existing legislation is adequate to address the problem.

Their warnings were made to a parliamentary committee which is examining possible measures, including legislation, to tackle false online information which the government says could threaten national security.

Executives from Facebook, Google and Twitter appeared before the committee Thursday, and are among scores of experts, academics and activists called to testify over eight days.

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WhatsApp co-founder tells everyone to delete Facebook

In 2014, Facebook bought WhatsApp for $16 billion, making its co-founders — Jan Koum and Brian Acton — very wealthy men. Koum continues to lead the company, but Acton quit earlier this year to start his own foundation. And he isn’t done merely with WhatsApp — in a post on Twitter today, Acton told his followers to delete Facebook.

“It is time,” Acton wrote, adding the hashtag #deletefacebook. Acton, who is worth $6.5 billion, did not immediately respond to a request for comment. WhatsApp declined to comment.

It was unclear whether Acton’s feelings about Facebook extend to his own app. But last month, Acton invested $50 million into Signal, an independent alternative to WhatsApp.

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Channel NewsAsia 17 hrs

Freedom in the World 2019

Overview - Singapore’s parliamentary political system has been dominated by the ruling People’s Action Party (PAP) and the family of current prime minister Lee Hsien Loong since 1959. The electoral and legal framework that the PAP has constructed allows for some political pluralism, but it constrains the growth of credible opposition parties and limits freedoms of expression, assembly, and association.

KEY DEVELOPMENTS IN 2018:

In January, Parliament established a Select Committee on Deliberate Online Falsehoods. In March, after a local historian asserted in a submission to the committee that the PAP government had itself disseminated falsehoods by misrepresenting a past crackdown on alleged communist plots against the state, he was questioned for six hours in a public hearing led by the home affairs minister. The combative hearing and others like it raised concerns about freedom of expression and academic freedom.
In April, the president signed the Public Order and Safety (Special Powers) Act, which granted the home affairs minister and police enhanced authority in the context of a “serious incident” such as a terrorist attack or mass protest. Officials would be permitted to potentially use lethal force and halt media coverage and online communications surrounding the incident in question.
Two PAP-run town councils pressed lawsuits against three members of Parliament (MPs) from the opposition Workers’ Party (WP) for alleged breaches of their fiduciary duties. The cases, which placed the defendants under significant financial pressure, began to be heard in October and were ongoing at year’s end.

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Brad Bowyer July 2 at 6:22 PM

Sadly we are now 133rd in the world freedom index and declining.... And we give that freedom up for what?

Time for us all to seriously think if we need a change from "rulership" to "leadership" to give the majority of us any future outside PAP servitude... or can we tahan this state of affairs a little while longer before it becomes unbearable?

But then what will be left of Singapore if we wait?

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related:

Facebook becomes Meta

Why is Facebook in trouble?

Facebook gives way to Singapore’s ‘fake news’ law

WhatsApp Clarifies Its New Privacy Policy

"Can we love our Country and fear at the same time?”