Facebook is trying to demystify the ways in which it tracks people when they aren't directly using the website or app.The company on Monday published a blog post that outlined its data collection practices less than a week after Mark Zuckerberg testified about his company in front of Congress. The CEO at the time promised to follow up on questions he couldn't answer on the spot.
The blog was written by product management director David Baser, it was mainly about third-party websites and apps that send data about their users to Facebook, regardless of whether those users have Facebook profiles.
In return for that information, Facebook helps those websites serve up relevant ads or receive analytics that help them understand how people use their services. The company gets this data from websites and apps that let people share or like posts using Facebook plugins, or log into the website with their Facebook accounts. Sites that use Facebook advertising or analytics tools also share data.Facebook also says it uses the data to improve its own ads and identify bots and bad actors.

According to Facebook, the information it receives can include the name of the website or app, your IP address, your browser, what operating system you use and whether you've visited the third-party site before.Facebook says it can match that data to a Facebook profile, if the person has one. If not, the company claims the data does not get used to create a profile.

Zuckerberg said during testimony last week that the company collects data about people who have not signed up for Facebook "for security purposes." That statement raised concerns about whether the company has "shadow profiles" with information about non-users.Facebook told CNNMoney late Monday that it does not have "shadow profiles."Related: Congress grilled Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg for nearly 10 hours. What's next?

Baser's post notably calls out other companies that it says do similar things. While Facebook has been getting the brunt of the recent outrage over its data collection and privacy practices, some methods are industry standard.

"Twitter, Pinterest and LinkedIn all have similar Like and Share buttons to help people share things on their services. Google has a popular analytics service. And Amazon, Google and Twitter all offer login features," Baser wrote in in the blog post. "In fact, most websites and apps send the same information to multiple companies each time you visit them."

The blog post also reviews the types of controls people with Facebook accounts have over their data. For example, users can opt out of ads or delete their profiles.

Here's some facts you need to know about:

When does Facebook get data about people from other websites and apps?

Many websites and apps use Facebook services to make their content and ads more engaging and relevant. These services include:
Social plugins, such as our Like and Share buttons, which make other sites more social and help you share content on Facebook;
Facebook Login, which lets you use your Facebook account to log into another website or app;
Facebook Analytics, which helps websites and apps better understand how people use their services
Facebook ads and measurement tools, which enable websites and apps to show ads from Facebook advertisers, to run their own ads on Facebook or elsewhere, and to understand the effectiveness of their ads.
When you visit a site or app that uses our services, we receive information even if you're logged out or don't have a Facebook account. This is because other apps and sites don't know who is using Facebook. (Emphasis added.)

MOSCOW (Reuters) - Russia’s communications watchdog said on Friday it had asked Facebook to explain why access had been restricted to the Facebook accounts of some Russian media organizations, RIA news agency said.

Roskomnadzor said it considered the restrictions to be a continuation of Facebook’s “unfriendly policy toward Russian users,” RIA said.

The report did not specify which accounts had been affected, but Roskomnadzor said the move by Facebook would make it harder for Russian and foreign social network users to follow the Russian news agenda.

Facebook said on Tuesday it had deleted hundreds of Russian accounts and pages associated with a “troll factory” indicted by U.S. prosecutors for fake activist and political posts in the 2016 U.S. election campaign.

Facebook said many of the deleted articles and pages came from Russia-based Federal News Agency, known as FAN, which they linked to the St Petersburg-based Internet Research Agency.

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg told Reuters on Tuesday that the agency had “repeatedly acted to deceive people and manipulate people around the world, and we don’t want them on Facebook anywhere.”



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• It's Time to Delete Facebook

• Facebook suffers drop of stocks amid alleged data leak crisis

• Download a Copy of Your Facebook data That Facebook Knows All About You

Facebook “has decided not to unveil” its line of connected home speakers, which boast digital assistant and video-chat capabilities, at its developer conference in May because too many people have wised up to the fact said products will probably turn their homes into Mark Zuckerberg-surveilled Panopticons, Bloomberg reported.

According to Bloomberg, Facebook has decided that the ongoing fallout of the Cambridge Analytica data scandal—in which the shady election data firm partnered with an app to build “psychometric profiles” on 50 million users without their consent—is the wrong time to move forward with the products. Zuckerberg has been called to testify before Congress over the incident, and may find himself hard-pressed to explain why Facebook let app developers access extensive data on users who hadn’t willingly sharing it. The Federal Trade Commission is also reportedly investigating whether company’s practises constitute a violation of a 2011 regulatory agreement, something that could result in staggering fines.

So yes, this might be indeed be a bad time to introduce a line of physical products whose purpose in the home is to collect data on users. Bloomberg writes:

The Bloomberg report also mentioned that Facebook had “already found in focus-group testing” that users were wary of a “Facebook-branded device in their living rooms,” which... well, duh. It’s unlikely the recent spate of very bad PR, which could get worse if Zuckerberg does poorly during whatever congressional hearings he might eventually end up speaking at or Facebook reveals firms other than Cambridge Analytica have absconded with user data, which it has already admitted is likely.

In any case, connected smart speakers whose purpose is at least partially to harvest user data are already a slightly concerning proposition, and it’s pretty clear that Facebook in particular is treading on thin ice. While it says that new privacy rules will be announced at the May developer’s conference, Facebook has lost about $80 billion (£56.4 billion) in market value since the Cambridge Analytica scandal broke, per CNBC, or roughly 18 per cent.


Also Read:

• Facebook Has Been Collecting Your Call History and SMS Data From Android Phones For Years
• It's Time to Delete Facebook
• Facebook suffers drop of stocks amid alleged data leak crisis
• Download a Copy of Your Facebook data That Facebook Knows All About You

If you have installed Facebook Messenger app on your Android device, there are chances that the company had been collecting your contacts, SMS, and call history data at least until late last year.
A tweet from Dylan McKay, a New Zealand-based programmer, which received more than 38,000 retweets (at the time of writing), showed how he found his year-old data—including complete logs of incoming and outgoing calls and SMS messages—in an archive he downloaded (as a ZIP file) from Facebook.


Facebook was collecting this data on its users from last few years, which was even reported earlier in media, but the story did not get much attention at that time.
Since Facebook had been embroiled into controversies over its data sharing practices after the Cambridge Analytica scandal last week, tweets from McKay went viral and has now fueled the never-ending privacy debate.
A Facebook spokesperson explained, since almost all social networking sites have been designed to make it easier for users to connect with their friends and family members, Facebook also uploads its users’ contacts to offer same.
As Ars reported, in older versions of Android when permissions were a lot less strict, the Facebook app took away contact permission at the time of installation that allowed the company access to call and message data automatically.
Eventually, Google changed the way Android permissions worked in version 16 of its API, making them more clear and granular by informing users whenever any app tries to execute permissions.





However, developers were able to bypass this change, and Facebook continued accessing call and SMS data until Google deprecated version 4.0 of the Android API in October last year.
Even you can check what data the social network has collected on you so far by going to your Facebook's Settings→Download a copy of your Facebook data→Start My Archive.
If you don't want Facebook to store or continuously upload your contacts to its server, you can turn off the continuous uploading setting in the Messenger app. This change will also delete all your previously uploaded contacts.
Facebook users on Apple devices are on the safer side, as iOS has never allowed silent access to call data.

Also Read:

• It's Time to Delete Facebook
• Facebook suffers drop of stocks amid alleged data leak crisis
• Download a Copy of Your Facebook data That Facebook Knows All About You

While Acton certainly isn’t the first person to suggest people delete Facebook from their lives, his tweet seems like a strong statement for someone who once applied for a job at Facebook years before creating WhatsApp, and who has only made a total of 74 tweets in the nine years since he created his account.

Last year, Facebook’s first president Sean Parker and former executive Chamath Palihapitiya both expressed serious misgivings about Facebook and how it messes with people’s psychological and social structures. Additionally, since the whole Cambridge Analytica scandal was revealed, Facebook’s stocked has dropped by more than seven percent.

But will this be enough to serious injure or take down Facebook’s massive online empire? Who knows, it’s still too early to tell.

The world's largest social media company Facebook suffered the biggest one-day drop of its stocks by seven percent on Wall Street, In four years following reported data leakage of its 50 million users for alleged political purposes.

The Facebook loss came after US and British media reported that the data of more than 50 million Facebook users were inappropriately used by a British data analysis company, Cambridge Analytica, in activities allegedly connected with US President Donald Trump during his 2016 campaign.
Trump's campaign reportedly used the firm's data during the primaries but not during the general election and Federal Election Commission numbers showed the firm collected $5.9 million in 2016 from Trump's campaign, Xinhua cited California-based The Mercury News daily as saying.
Cambridge Analytica received user data from a Facebook app years ago that purported to be a psychological research tool, though the firm was not authorized to have that information.

Facebook admitted that an estimated 270,000 people had downloaded the app and shared their personal details with it.
Facebook said in an official post that it had suspended "Strategic Communication Laboratories (SCL), including their political data analytics firm, Cambridge Analytica," from its website.
It said the two companies had failed to delete user data acquired in 2015 in violation of Facebook rules.

You’ve probably heard about Facebook’s recent problems, around SMS notifications sent using its two-factor authentication system. The company’s chief security officer, Alex Stamos, explained the same in a blog post. The messages were apparently sent due to a bug that caused it to “send non-security-related SMS notifications to these phone numbers”. The company uses the automated number 362-65, for its two-factor authentication number.

A bug in that system is important, since two-factor is meant to be for security in the first place. A numeric code is sent to the user’s smartphone in order to allow them to login to devices. In the recent issue, the company ended up sending notifications to users without their consent. When someone tried to stop these notifications by replying to them, the messages were being posted to their own profiles, as status messages.

It seems the issue may have existed for months, and even longer. It was first reported by Gabriel Lewi, a software engineer in the Bay Area. Lewi tweeted about it earlier in the week. “I am sorry for any inconvenience these messages might have caused. We are working to ensure that people who sign up for two-factor authentication won’t receive non-security-related notifications from us unless they specifically choose to receive them, and the same will be true for those who signed up in the past,” wrote Stamos, in the blog.

• Messenger Kids lets kids under 13 chat with friends and family, and has no ads
• Parents are able to approve who their kids can message through the app
• But, experts say it could lure kids into harmful social media practices
• And, a report claims half of safety advisory board has financial ties to the firm