Facebook is once again the focus of a privacy scandal, but this time the social network may not be as guilty as some might think.
A Wall Street Journal release today revealed that 11 popular mobile applications are sending data to Facebook servers, containing sensitive information such as heart rate, blood pressure, menstrual cycle or even pregnancy status.
This data is not collected by Facebook itself, but by application developers who use Facebook's Software Development Kit (SDK) to collection metrics and analytics about how users engage with their apps.
The data is sent to Facebook servers for storage in the form of "application events", which are specific files for each application. As mentioned above, some applications may send health-related information, depending on the profile of each application.
Η WSJ publication claims that Facebook has secretly accessed this data according to the terms of use of its SDK, and is directly critical of the company.
- Wolf, a wolf in the sheep! Come on, villagers, help!
His dear fellow villagers climbed on the slope, but they found the sheep grazing quietly and the sheepskin to keep his belly from laughing ...
TIP: where shepherd put Media…
However, things are not so dramatic and one-sided, as WSJ journalists wrote in their publication.
There is nothing special about Facebook's SDK. It's another SDK like many more for analytics from mobile devices.
In the words of a former Facebook product manager, who expressed his complaints about WSJ's publication in Twitter, the Facebook analytics data SDK is no different from Google Analytics.
By the way that Google Analytics scripts are built into billions of sites and collect data about the pages that users visit, and which buttons and links they click on, Facebook does so.
Just like Google, Facebook does not force app developers to use SDK's analytics. There are many other mobile analytics SDKs on the market, and application developers use the Facebook tool with their own free will.
If the developers of the 11 apps in question, reported by the Wall Street Journal, had used another SDK for the analysis data and sent the same data to some other analytics company, no one would have known. Now everyone's going crazy just because it's Facebook.
“Facebook dominates mobile ad spending like Google dominates desktop advertisements. Έτσι χρειάζεται μια πλατφόρμα ανάλυσης για το κινητό οικοσύστημα”, ανέφερε ο Antonio García Martínez, πρώην διευθυντής προϊόντων Faceboοk και τρέχων ιδρυτής της διαφημιστικής πλατφόρμας AdGrok.
"Facebook does not deal with this data collection, nor does it store it in any useful form (it is stored as 'facts', so that the developer can sort user actions)," says Martínez.
"Facebook here works like a bean counter."
______________
- Facebook: can no longer control himself
- Facebook: what is the BOLO list and who it is
- Search United Kingdom: Facebook is digital gangsters
