Facebook is Working With ISPs to Kill California Privacy Rules
"Last year we noted how Google and Facebook had joined Comcast, AT&T and Verizon in lying to California lawmakers in order to kill new broadband privacy protections in the state. California had moved to pass its own, fairly modest broadband privacy rules after the GOP and Trump administration killed planned federal rules (at direct ISP lobbyist behest) before they could take effect last March.
To accomplish this, AT&T, Verizon, Comcast, Google and Facebook all lied repeatedly to state lawmakers, claiming that meaningful privacy protections would hurt children, increase popups, and "aid extremism."
As the EFF notes here, absolutely none of these claims were even remotely true. But these behaviors take on some added importance in the wake of Facebook's Cambridge Analytica scandal, which resulted in the data of more than 50 million Facebook users being hijacked and used to help specifically target users during the 2016 Presidential election.
"The entire company is outraged that we were deceived," Facebook said of the scandal. Yet Facebook has been plenty busy engaging in deception of its own.
In the wake of last year's combined attack on consumer privacy in California it appears that Google, Facebook, AT&T, Verizon and Comcast have again joined forces to scuttle yet another privacy proposal.
According to the Los Angeles Times, Facebook is again under fire by privacy groups who note that, alongside Google and major ISPs, have donated more than $1 million to a PAC tasked with killing privacy protections for Californians. The kind of rules that could have helped thwart privacy scandals like the one Facebook currently finds itself embroiled in.
The California Consumer Privacy Act of 2018 would require companies and ISPs "fully disclose what personal information from Californians they collect, buy or share." It would also require that companies provide opt out tools for data collection, and would also ban the practice of charging users more for privacy, something both AT&T and Comcast have already explored.
Alastair Mactaggart, chairman of Californians for Consumer Privacy, was quick to highlight Facebook's hypocrisy in a letter to the social media giant this week.
“Something’s not adding up here," Mactaggart wrote Facebook. "It is time to be honest with Facebook users and shareholders about what information was collected, sold or breached in the Cambridge Analytica debacle; and to come clean about the true basis for your opposition to the California Consumer Privacy Act of 2018."
Facebook so far has only compounded its problems by not only threatening to sue news outlets for telling the truth about the scandal, but by CEO Mark Zuckerberg's total failure to address the PR crisis since it first erupted late last week."
http://www.dslreports.com/shownews/Facebook-is-Working-With-ISPs-to-Kill-California-Privacy-Rules-141470
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