
“The facts tell a different story.” ‘A majority of Facebook users’ “While it’s fair to criticise how we enforced our developer policies more than five years ago, it’s untrue to suggest we didn’t or don’t care about privacy,” that statement said. Parakilas first went public with his concerns about privacy at Facebook four months ago, but his direct experience policing Facebook data given to third parties throws new light on revelations over how such data was obtained by Cambridge Analytica.įacebook did not respond to a request for comment on the information supplied by Parakilas, but directed the Guardian to a November 2017 blogpost in which the company defended its data sharing practices, which it said had “significantly improved” over the last five years. I found that utterly shocking and horrifying.” He added: “They felt that it was better not to know. He said one Facebook executive advised him against looking too deeply at how the data was being used, warning him: “Do you really want to see what you’ll find?” Parakilas said he interpreted the comment to mean that “Facebook was in a stronger legal position if it didn’t know about the abuse that was happening”. However, he said that when he told other executives the company should proactively “audit developers directly and see what’s going on with the data” he was discouraged from the approach. Parakilas said he “always assumed there was something of a black market” for Facebook data that had been passed to external developers. Once the data left Facebook servers there was not any control, and there was no insight into what was going on.” 03:41 What is the Cambridge Analytica scandal? - video explainerĪsked what kind of control Facebook had over the data given to outside developers, he replied: “Zero.
