Since 2018, the trust we had in the largest social network of all has been lost . The Cambridge Analytica scandal happened first. Three years later the famous Facebook Files were leaked thanks to the report published by the Wall Street Journal.
All this has tarnished the legacy of a platform that, prior to these scandals, was one of the most beloved by Internet users. And although they have tried to leave these controversies in the past , as with the change of name from Facebook to Meta, it seems that the social network still has some scandals to face.
Why? Well, because a new report has been leaked that makes us distrust Facebook even more. This reveals that the social network has no control over your data , so much so that it does not know what is done with it and where it is stored.
Where does your Facebook data go? No idea
This information comes from a report created by privacy engineers on Facebook’s Ads and Commercial Products team . This leaked document is available on DocumentCloud and in it you can see how the staff of the social network expresses its concern about the control of its users’ data.
The engineers warn when writing that “we do not have an adequate level of control and reasonable explanation about how our systems use the data of the social network.” Said team attributes this inability to control the data to the open data circulation system managed by the social network . This allows the platform and its algorithms to obtain data from its own users, third parties and even confidential information without restriction.
According to experts, there would be better control of the data handled by the platform if it circulated in a closed system. To explain it better, Facebook’s security engineers attach the image we left above to the document. This is an analogy of how data is distributed on Facebook similar to dropping a drop of ink into a glass of water . Once a piece of data enters the Facebook system, it is difficult to control it and predict its movement.
How to deal with the new data protection laws if we do not control our data? Facebook’s main concern
New measures have been adopted around the world to regulate user information found on the Internet. Countries such as India, South Korea, Thailand, and South Africa have established stricter data protection laws that require platforms to properly control the information they store about their users.
Clearly the reason this report was written was to express the privacy team’s concern about how Facebook intends to deal with these new regulations.
And although Meta has declared that they are working on technical solutions to adapt to the new data protection laws, it is difficult to think that they will achieve it in the short term if today they have no idea where your data is going.
