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Audit Approved of Facebook Policies, Even After Cambridge Analytica Leak (nytimes.com)
Nicholas Confessore reports via The New York Times: An auditing firm responsible for monitoring Facebook for federal regulators told them last year that the company had sufficient privacy protections in place, even after the social media giant lost control of a huge trove of user data that was improperly obtained by the political consulting firm Cambridge Analytica. The assertion, by PwC, came in a report submitted to the Federal Trade Commission in early 2017. The report, a redacted copy of which is available on the commission's website, is one of several periodic reviews of Facebook's compliance with a 2011 federal consent decree, which required Facebook to take wide-ranging steps to prevent the abuse of users' information and to inform them how it was being shared with other companies. The accounting firm, formerly known as PricewaterhouseCoopers, effectively gave Facebook a clean bill of health. "Facebook's privacy controls were operating with sufficient effectiveness to provide reasonable assurance to protect the privacy" of users, said the assessment, which stretched from February 2015 to February 2017. But during that period, Facebook was aware that a researcher based in Britain, Aleksandr Kogan, had provided Cambridge Analytica with private Facebook data from millions of users.
You can't. I have no Facebook account, but it will have my data anyway from anyone who has ever put me in their contacts. I have no idea if I've been 'tagged' in photos and due to the closed nature I can't search to find out.
They do have a page to see what data they hold on you if you don't have an account, but to use it of course you need to....send them your data so they can check for matches. Catch 22.
Problems: 1) auditors are paid by the auditees, 2) they do their job, what they were asked for, and not more. Why do you think these audit / consultancy firms are that expensive? An audit, done to reveal the kind of recent leaks, would only truly work if done by a public institution.
Slashdot, fix the reply notifications... You won't get away with it...
Funny that as a matter of public policy they approved of the Democrats doing it years earlier.
"His name was James Damore."