Thursday, April 05, 2018

Facebook spies on your messages

Bloomberg reports:
Facebook Inc. scans the links and images that people send each other on Facebook Messenger, and reads chats when they’re flagged to moderators, making sure the content abides by the company’s rules. If it doesn’t, it gets blocked or taken down.

The company confirmed the practice after an interview published earlier this week with Chief Executive Officer Mark Zuckerberg raised questions about Messenger’s practices and privacy. Zuckerberg told Vox’s Ezra Klein a story about receiving a phone call related to ethnic cleansing in Myanmar. Facebook had detected people trying to send sensational messages through the Messenger app, he said.

“In that case, our systems detect what’s going on,” Zuckerberg said. “We stop those messages from going through.”
Google automatically scans gmail messages, and has occasionally reported users to the police.

It is funny that Facebook has been selling users' private data to advertisers and political campaigns for years, but the press only gets excited about it when it is revealed that the data was possibly used for Trump's benefit.

Do you really want Facebook taking sides in a civil war in Burma?

What did you think was happening when you click a "Like" button? That button exists for the purpose of selling your privacy to marketers.

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