Why Facebook is unable to manage User’s Personal Data
Engineers in charge of the advertising system indicate in a document that they have no idea where the user data is, once it has been collected by the social network. It’s a new leaked document that won’t improve Facebook’s bad reputation when it comes to the security of its users’ personal data.
A system too complex to be regulated
This document was written by privacy engineers from Facebook’s advertising team. The advertising activity is, as everyone knows, the heart of the reactor of the social network and today provides it with almost all of its annual income.
These engineers are more specifically responsible for the construction and maintenance of the gigantic system which connects brands and local or international companies with the users of the platform, targeted according to their socio-professional category, their age, their centers of interest or their place of residence.
Their goal is therefore to process the information collected on each subscriber and to adapt to changes in company policy as well as to the decisions of international regulatory bodies. However, as they point out bluntly in this note, this work is simply impossible today.
“We cannot confidently make controlled policy changes or enforce external commitments such as ‘we will not use X data for Y purpose’. And yet, this is exactly what regulators expect of us,” they explain.
Facebook would work to reform its advertising tools, but without effect for the moment
To explain their words, the engineers use a telling analogy: “Imagine that you are holding a bottle of ink in your hand. This ink bottle is a mixture of all kinds of data from a user. You pour that ink into a lake of water (our open data systems; our open culture), and it flows, everywhere. How do I put this ink back in the bottle? How to organize it again, so that it only flows to the authorized places of the lake?
Facebook must comply with the European GDPR, however, and Article 5 specifically states that this data may be “collected for specified, explicit and legitimate purposes, and not further processed in a way incompatible with those purposes”. According to the authors of the text, the infrastructure developed by Facebook makes it simply impossible to respect the text. The social network does not know where this data is once entered into its system or who holds it at a given time.
However, the company is trying to deceive. It thus indicates that it is working on tools that are more respectful of the privacy of its users, a new device called Basic Ads internally. Initially planned for a launch at the beginning of 2020, it is still awaited.
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