Facebook is under fire for not protecting your data better

Facebook has dealt with a lot of headaches this year, perhaps none more bizarre than its current dilemma: Sealed documents are leaking from an old lawsuit filed against Facebook by a developer who built an app to help people find Facebook photos of women in bikinis.

The lawsuit, filed by a company called Six4Three with a now-defunct app called Pikinis, was originally filed in 2015. It has been front and center this week as some previously redacted documents from that lawsuit are starting to become public.

Mark Zuckerberg isn’t throwing anybody under the bus. Except himself.

The Facebook CEO says that if anyone at Facebook deserves to be fired over the company’s Cambridge Analytica privacy fiasco, a major headache that’s cost the company a lot of goodwill and trust with users and regulators, it should be him.

Facebook can’t get out of its own way.

After months of nonstop drama centered around Facebook’s privacy policies, which included multiple formal hearings for CEO Mark Zuckerberg in front of U.S. and EU lawmakers, the company on Monday announced another privacy issue: A software bug “unblocked” some people who had previously been blocked by another user, meaning the unblocked user could suddenly see some posts from the person who blocked them.

When Tom Peters started studying management in the 1970s, he was told the real “weirdos” were 30 miles south of San Francisco, at an obscure company called Hewlett-Packard.

Peters’ interviews with executives from HP, 3M and other emerging leaders formed the backbone of his seminal 1982 management book, “In Search of Excellence.” Thirty-six years later, he’s become the celebrated author of 16 more books, most recently “The Excellence Dividend.”

After a year of troubling mishaps on its massive social platform, Facebook has landed itself in yet another self-inflicted privacy debacle.

As many as 14 million Facebook users who thought they were posting items they only wanted their friends or smaller groups to see may have been posting that content publicly, the company said Thursday.

There are still some (big) rocks to be turned over in Facebook’s Cambridge Analytica drama.

Despite suspending the data firm, which collected the personal data of as many as 87 million Facebook users without their permission, Facebook is still trying to figure how big the Cambridge Analytica problem is.

Facebook on Thursday will start labeling political and issue ads on the social network — a move intended to keep foreign governments from buying ads that might influence U.S. voters.

Fulfilling a promise it made last year, Facebook is rolling out a new election ad dashboard, which will allow users to see who paid for a political ad and demographic info for people who saw it. Political advertisers will also need to register with Facebook by “confirming their identity and location” with the company.

Facebook will ask users around the world — not just those in Europe — to review their privacy settings, a step the company took with European users last month as a way to comply with the region’s upcoming GDPR privacy laws, which go into effect on Friday, May 25.

All Facebook users will see a full-screen prompt in the coming weeks asking them to review their settings for some of Facebook’s important features, like targeted advertising and facial recognition technology.

For an hour on Tuesday, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg faced some tough questions from Europe’s political leaders. They have concerns about his company’s data policies, its role in elections worldwide and whether the mammoth social network should be considered a monopoly and broken up.

The hearing was more aggressive, and some of the questions more pointed, than the queries Zuckerberg faced from U.S. politicians last month.

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg will answer questions about his company’s data privacy policies on Tuesday during a 75-minute meeting with elected officials from the European Union.

The meeting, conducted by the European Parliament, elected members of the European Union’s governing body, is set for 6:15 pm local time in Brussels (9:15 am PT in California). It was originally planned as a closed-door meeting, but will now be streamed live on the European Parliament’s website.

Update: Zuckerberg’s hearing is set. The Facebook CEO will appear before the European Parliament on Tuesday, May 22, at 6:15 pm local time in Brussels, 9:15 am PT back in California.

The meeting format has changed as well. Zuckerberg will now answer questions on a video livestream, according to a tweet from European Parliament President Antonio Tajani.

Facebook is on the hunt for other Cambridge Analytica-type bad actors: Developers who had access to Facebook user data and employed it in a way that violates the company’s guidelines.

On Monday, Facebook offered an update to that hunt: The company says it has reviewed “thousands of apps” with access to Facebook user data and suspended 200 of them “pending a thorough investigation into whether they did in fact misuse any data.”

One of the more interesting takeaways to come out of Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s multi-day congressional testimony last week was confirmation that the social giant collects data from people online even if they don’t have a Facebook account.

Also interesting: There’s no way to avoid it.

Facebook is taking its first formal steps this week toward complying with the European Union’s new data privacy regulations, known as the GDPR, which are set to go into effect on May 25.

As part of the new rules, tech companies like Facebook will be required to add more privacy controls and better explain how and why it collects user data. It’s one of the main reasons Facebook recently rewrote its terms of service and data policies.

It’s time to move on from everyone’s favorite Facebook conspiracy theory: No, Facebook is not listening to you through your phone’s microphone.

This is a crowd favorite. When Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg testified before Congress this week to discuss the company’s data collection and privacy policies, he was asked if Facebook was spying on people through their microphones twice: Once by Senator Gary Peters, D-Mich., on Tuesday, and once by Congressman Larry Bucshon, R-Ill., on Wednesday.

If we’ve learned anything from Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s lengthy congressional testimony this week, it’s that most people are woefully unaware of how much data Facebook collects about them, and then how that data is used.

Earlier this week, we wrote a story explaining how Facebook uses your personal data to target you with advertising. But understanding how targeted ads work is just the first step. You should also know how to find the data Facebook is using to target you with those ads, and how to remove the stuff that isn’t actually relevant.

Mark Zuckerberg’s former personal pollster, Tavis McGinn, thinks Facebook is having a negative impact on society. Based on his most recent survey, it seems much of the world agrees.

McGinn, who used to track the public’s perception of CEO Zuckerberg and COO Sheryl Sandberg while working for Facebook, left Facebook after just six months and launched his own polling company, Honest Data. The 18-person company conducts market research for large tech firms. It hasn’t accepted outside funding.

Facebook collects a lot of data about you — everything from your email address to the strength of your phone’s battery.

The simplest explanation for this is that Facebook uses that data to make money. No, Facebook doesn’t sell your data. But it does sell access to you, or more specifically, access to your News Feed, and uses that data to show you specific ads it thinks you’re likely to enjoy or click on.

Mark Zuckerberg testified before Congress on Tuesday in a marathon five-hour hearing, and he walked away with a victory.

Wearing a navy blue suit and a royal blue tie instead of his usual T-shirt and jeans, the Facebook CEO spent much of the day answering questions about how Facebook’s services work. Does Facebook delete user data from its server once an account is deleted? (Yes.) Can Facebook use your WhatsApp messages to target you with ads? (No.)

Greetings from Washington, D.C.! We are settled in the hearing room at the Hart Senate Office Building on Capitol Hill awaiting Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, who will answer questions from Senators today about Facebook’s data privacy practices in the wake of the company’s Cambridge Analytica scandal.

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Every day, Americans interact with a number of major tech companies that have access to some of our most personal information: Our contacts, our location, our credit card info. Americans say they trust Facebook with that data the least by far.

Some 56 percent of Americans said they trusted Facebook least with their personal information out of all major tech companies, according to a joint SurveyMonkey/Recode poll. Respondents were asked to choose among Amazon, Apple, Facebook, Google, Lyft, Microsoft, Netflix, Tesla, Twitter, Snap and Uber. Twenty percent selected none of the above.

Facebook believes that Cambridge Analytica, the data firm at the center of the company’s recent privacy scandal, may have collected personal data from as many as 87 million Facebook users without their permission.

Were you one of them? You can now check by using this link.

When Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg testifies this week before Congress, it’ll offer up a version of Zuckerberg we don’t normally get to see: A version where he’s on-camera, unscripted and answering tough questions.

For Congress, it’s a chance for politicians to bare their teeth and hold somebody accountable for the sins of the internet — diminished privacy, fake news and the polarization of ideas, issues that Facebook deals with more often than most.

Mark Zuckerberg is about to face two days of congressional grilling in Washington. The Facebook CEO will testify before Congress on Tuesday and Wednesday about the company’s data privacy practices and the role it plays in elections around the world. Stakes are high, to say the least.

And while the notorious hoodie-wearing-CEO is expected to apologize (again) in his prepared testimony for how slow Facebook responded to the abuse on its site, this isn’t the first time Zuckerberg has faced the hot seat. About eight years ago, Zuckerberg sat in another kind of hot seat — the red seat — and faced a grilling from Recode’s (back when it was All Things D) Kara Swisher and Walt Mossberg. At one point he was sweating so much he had to take off his hoodie.

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg is headed to Washington this week to testify before multiple congressional committees about the company’s data privacy practices and the role it plays in elections around the world.

There will be plenty of theater once Zuckerberg sits to take questions from elected officials eager to land a punch. One thing that looks like it won’t be theatrical? Zuckerberg’s prepared testimony.