Parliament seizes cache of Facebook internal papers

UK Guardian ^

[Liz]

Damian Collins, chair of the UK's culture, media and sport select committee, invoked a rare parliamentary mechanism
to compel the software founder to hand over the documents during a business trip to London. When he failed to do so,
he was apparently escorted to parliament.....told he risked fines and even imprisonment if he didn’t hand over the documents.

Jeepers........they play rough.

[M Kehoe]

Hi.

“Cambridge Analytica scandal.”

Didn’t read one sentence on 0bama and Cankles using fakebook data. Heck, fakebook had offices in their campaigns.

5.56mm

[Liz]

HERE'S THE C/A REFERENCE---CIRCA JULY 2018
Facebook suspends analytics firm investigating data use
The Hill | 07/20/18 | John Bowden / FR Posted by yesthatjallen

Facebook has suspended a Boston-based analytics firm as the company probes the types of data the firm harvested from the Facebook platform and whether Crimson Hexagon's contracts with the U.S. government...... and its nonprofit tied to Russia's government...... violate company policies. Representatives for Facebook told the WSJ that the company was previously unaware of some of the contracts held by the firm.

Crimson Hexagon, advertises itself as the holder of more than one trillion social media posts scraped from Facebook.........and other social media sites.

“Facebook has a responsibility to help protect people’s information, which is one of the reasons why we have tightened” access to users' personal information, Facebook's VP for partnerships Ime Archibong told the Journal. He added that Facebook allows firms like Crimson Hexagon to produce “anonymized insights for business purposes.” A separate spokesman for the company told the Journal that “based on our investigation to date, Crimson Hexagon did not obtain any Facebook or Instagram information inappropriately.”

Crimson Hexagon's chief technology officer Chris Bingham told the Journal that his company does not collect private information, adding that they are “working together to resolve the issue as quickly as possible.” The two companies plan to meet in the upcoming days.

U.S. government agencies paid Crimson Hexagon more than $800,000 for 22 separate contracts in the past four years, according to the Journal. The company has also worked with companies based in foreign countries including Russia and Turkey, the Journal reported.

Facebook responded to a firestorm of criticism earlier this year when it was revealed that another firm, Cambridge Analytica, had obtained the personal information of tens of millions of users without their knowledge or consent. The firm worked with the Trump campaign during the 2016 election, though it says it did not use the collected data during that time.