Facebook has been going through a pretty tough time as a social media platform, although it is difficult to feel sorry for them given the complete and utter disregard that they have had for the various people that they were purported to be working with as well as the users that tend to use their platform on a regular basis all in all.
It definitely seems that the social media platform simply cannot catch any kind of a break because of the fact that about 4000 pages document that it had desperately been trying to keep sealed were recently leaked to the public. This trove of documents has been leaked by investigative reporter Duncan Campbell who had been trying to release this information for quite a long period of time all in all but Facebook had continuously shut down any attempts to release this information stating that published information did not provide a balanced view of the kinds of activities that the company was involved in.
However, in spite of the fact that Facebook has been trying with all of its might to prevent these documents from being released to the public, the leak ended up happening and as a result of this fact a lot of details about Facebook’s operations and goings on have been revealed, none of which reflect all that well on a social media platform that already has quite a bad reputation for a wide variety of reasons, and it’s fair to say that this bad reputation is more or less well deserved when you take into consideration the numerous things that Facebook has done over the course of the past few years.
There are several things that have been released in these documents. A lot of these have to do with how Facebook has been using its user data, for its own advantages.
For example, Facebook used its control over user data to try and cripple its competitors such as YouTube as well as a wide variety of smaller competitors that were not as capable as YouTube of surviving this onslaught. Facebook restricted access to user data to developers in an attempt to further stifle competition by making it difficult for developers to access information that is actually quite necessary for them to be able to make the most of the project that they might be working on at any given point in time.
What’s truly insidious about these revelations is that Facebook tried to do them while passing them off as attempts to help users achieve more privacy on the platform, even though the intent behind these activities was pretty much certainly to secure a Facebook monopoly and prevent its competitors from having a real fighting chance all in all.
Now, Facebook is going to be quick to dispute this saying that their actual goal was indeed to protect user privacy but the fact of the matter is that some other things that were revealed in these documents are going to make it hard for people to believe that Facebook truly had the people’s best interests at heart.
For example, Facebook considered selling access to user data, something that it did not end up doing but was definitely considering for quite some time. Another sinister detail that was revealed was that Facebook had a whitelist of companies that it would give special access to data to. Perhaps one of the most shocking things that were revealed was that Facebook had planned to spy on Android users, specifically their locations in an attempt to gather more data that they could sell.
This is a pretty huge scandal and it has widespread implications, and we will just have to wait and see how all of this plays out.
Read next: Facebook is bringing some new changes in its corporate logo to make it more clear what it owns
It definitely seems that the social media platform simply cannot catch any kind of a break because of the fact that about 4000 pages document that it had desperately been trying to keep sealed were recently leaked to the public. This trove of documents has been leaked by investigative reporter Duncan Campbell who had been trying to release this information for quite a long period of time all in all but Facebook had continuously shut down any attempts to release this information stating that published information did not provide a balanced view of the kinds of activities that the company was involved in.
However, in spite of the fact that Facebook has been trying with all of its might to prevent these documents from being released to the public, the leak ended up happening and as a result of this fact a lot of details about Facebook’s operations and goings on have been revealed, none of which reflect all that well on a social media platform that already has quite a bad reputation for a wide variety of reasons, and it’s fair to say that this bad reputation is more or less well deserved when you take into consideration the numerous things that Facebook has done over the course of the past few years.
There are several things that have been released in these documents. A lot of these have to do with how Facebook has been using its user data, for its own advantages.
For example, Facebook used its control over user data to try and cripple its competitors such as YouTube as well as a wide variety of smaller competitors that were not as capable as YouTube of surviving this onslaught. Facebook restricted access to user data to developers in an attempt to further stifle competition by making it difficult for developers to access information that is actually quite necessary for them to be able to make the most of the project that they might be working on at any given point in time.
What’s truly insidious about these revelations is that Facebook tried to do them while passing them off as attempts to help users achieve more privacy on the platform, even though the intent behind these activities was pretty much certainly to secure a Facebook monopoly and prevent its competitors from having a real fighting chance all in all.
Now, Facebook is going to be quick to dispute this saying that their actual goal was indeed to protect user privacy but the fact of the matter is that some other things that were revealed in these documents are going to make it hard for people to believe that Facebook truly had the people’s best interests at heart.
For example, Facebook considered selling access to user data, something that it did not end up doing but was definitely considering for quite some time. Another sinister detail that was revealed was that Facebook had a whitelist of companies that it would give special access to data to. Perhaps one of the most shocking things that were revealed was that Facebook had planned to spy on Android users, specifically their locations in an attempt to gather more data that they could sell.
This is a pretty huge scandal and it has widespread implications, and we will just have to wait and see how all of this plays out.
Read next: Facebook is bringing some new changes in its corporate logo to make it more clear what it owns
