An internal Facebook document has been leaked, showing that managing private data within the social network is very difficult to manage…

FB (dead) and the private data of its users, it’s a rather long and messy story. Of course we will remember The Cambridge Analytica scandal In 2018, Mark Zuckerberg’s social network is regularly harassed about this, as certain practices are mentioned or the laws of different countries require the Meta to be more transparent or strict.

This, moreover, is the starting point for the . file internal report It was produced in 2021 by Facebook privacy engineers and released today by Motherboard (Engadget).

Difficult to adapt to local laws

Increasingly, governments are passing laws to regulate the use of private data on the Internet. In Europe, for example, we have General Data Protection Regulation, mais les contraintes locales se multiplient : il existe le Privacy Act aux États-Unis, mais aussi de nouvelles protections qui sont mises en place dans différents pays d’Asie (Corée du Sud, Inde, Thaïlande) ou encore du Sud en Afrique in Egypt. to FBIt’s real ” tsunami » New restrictions.

The report in question also raises the alarm:We do not have a sufficient level of control and explanation over how our systems use data, and therefore cannot properly influence policy changes. […] Like “we will not use x data for y purposes”. However, this is exactly what the organizers expect of usTo the authors of this report,This increases the risk of errors and distortions“.

A drop of ink in the ocean?

According to this report, Facebook’s main problem is the lack of fragmentation of the various private data collected. All data collected, whether by Facebook or by a third party and whether sensitive or not, is mixed. “If we can’t list all the data we have – where it is, where it goes, how it is used – how can we commit it to the outside world?“.

To illustrate the problem, the report’s authors compared this to a bottle of ink (private data) that was poured into a lake of water (the net”open data” from Facebook). “How do I get this ink back into the bottle? How is it organized again so that it only flows in the authorized places of the lake?“.

In other words, Facebook, in the coming years, will have to completely review the work of its architecture in order to avoid new scandals, or worse, penalties for the company from governments.

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