Facebook has faced a torrent of criticism for not doing enough to protect its users’ data.
Just yesterday, my mom accidentally gave away some of her personal information on Facebook through a game. This shows that they haven't done too much to protect user data.
the company says OneAudience did not cooperate with
Shouldn't this be grounds enough for a lawsuit?
Back in November, Facebook and Twitter said that OneAudience had been harvesting private data, such as people’s names, genders, emails, usernames, and potentially people’s last tweets.
OneAudience could do so much with this data. They could sell the data to other companies to make more money, or they could even try and impersonate the person to scam their friends. That's happened to my family, and I don't want that to happen to others.
The suit shows the potential privacy downsides of opting to use your Facebook (or Twitter or Google) credentials to log in to new accounts instead of creating a unique username and password.
I use my Google account to connect to some websites, and now I'm kind of regretting that decision. I don't think I'll connect with Google again because of this.
it can then use to target ads to you.
Here's where it goes way too far! Targeting ads to people is legal, but the way in which you get the information to target the ads to is where you can get into trouble. Adding cookies to a website with the user's permission is legal, but doing this is definitely illegal.
they may also contain tools that aren’t necessary, such as trackers that send information about your device and app usage
Here it is. People don't read the terms and conditions when downloading something, and end up downloading something that they originally didn't want.
getting app developers to install a malicious software development kit, or SDK, in their apps.
I can see how this could go wrong. They could install something additional with the seemingly innocent software.
it says paid app developers to exploit the “login with Facebook” feature to improperly gain access to personal data without users’ permission.
This is definitely wrong to do. People trust that signing up with Facebook will be safe and secure, but exploiting this information is just exploiting people's trust.