I received this email from Citizens Against Monopoly.
A new story from the New York Times exposes yet another way Mark Zuckerberg has abused user trust to build Facebook into a social-network juggernaut. Facebook secretly “struck agreements allowing phone and other device makers access to vast amounts of its users’ personal information.”
Facebook gave the over 60 companies — including Apple, Blackberry, Samsung, Amazon, and Microsoft — “access to the data of users’ friends without their explicit consent, even after declaring that it would no longer share such information with outsiders.”
The full list of companies isn’t known.
These secret agreements look like clear violations of the 2011 consent decree Facebook signed with the Federal Trade Commission.
Facebook Inc. enjoys social networking market dominance, with strong majorities of Americans using one or a combination of its desktop and mobile products, which now include Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, and Messenger.
Relatedly, Facebook holds a dominant market position in online advertising due in part to the unregulated collection of user activities through its social-media and tracking products and through data-sharing agreements with other data aggregators.
Story after story is now revealing that Facebook built that its dominance through repeated violations of user privacy and deliberate negligence — or, as Mark Zuckerberg himself liked to call it, by “moving fast and breaking things.”
As Rep. David Cicilline said, “Sure looks like Zuckerberg lied to Congress about whether users have ‘complete control’ over who sees our data on Facebook.”
The five members of the Federal Trade Commission, which is the part of our government tasked with overseeing Facebook, has the authority and power to make Facebook safe for our democracy. Armed with the 2011 consent decree, the FTC has the immediate power to impose remedies that will break up Facebook’s monopoly power, give us the freedom to communicate across networks, and protect our privacy.
Together, we will make sure that they do.
Read the New York Times story.
Share the news widely.
Thank you,
CAM is a growing movement to protect America’s (and maybe the world’s) economy and democracy from corporate monopolies that undermine opportunity, competition, choice, and freedom of expression.
ps.
Facebook has a fantastic hack for businesses who wish to advertise directly to you (said sarcastically). All they need is either your email address or phone number and upload that list to Facebook. So now you’ve become a laser targeted object of adverts from people or companies you know. By the way this is not a suggestion to go and do this, but I understand this might happen too. It’s to highlight that once you’re on a list, they can do with it what they wish. Now, you can remove yourself from those lists, although it may already be too late, watch the video on how they do this. You need to go to settings in Facebook, select ‘Ads’, 4th items from the bottom to undo all those companies who have you in their list. Enjoy!
[embed]https://youtu.be/6uOdeWJsF10[/embed]