A social network giant, Facebook is preventing Developers to use its massive amount of data about users for surveillance. The developers want to use this data to monitor protesters and activist.
Yesterday, the company stated that it is making policies more explicit and said:
” Facebook says it has already taken action against developers who created or marketed tools meant to be used for surveillance. It says it wants to “be sure everyone understands the underlying policy and how to comply.”
In the last year, Facebook and Instagram had provided its user data to Geofeedia, the company which develops product marketed to law enforcement agencies.
The Aclu said:
The new p”At the time that while both Instagram and Facebook cut off access after finding out about this, Facebook did not have a “public policy specifically prohibiting developers” from taking user data for surveillance.”
The developers should protect the information as carried by social media networks, According to prohibition:
“The developers should protect the the information you receive from us against unauthorized access, use, or disclosure. For example, don’t use data obtained from us to provide tools that are used for surveillance.”
According to Aclu report, the data, as provided by the company to Geofeedia, only includes the public posts, not those posts that are restricted to the users to Friends or any data that contains any kind of restriction except public posts.
Yet, this data is still helping them because it is very difficult for them to search for a person individually and get information from their posts.
In Last year, Attorney for ACLU of Nothern California posted that Facebook has allowed Geofeedia to get access to the data feed known as “Topic Feed API”, which is tool used by the advertisers
But, Geofeedia utilizes it to get public feed posts mentioning the specific topic, a place or event etc. For an instance, “monitor hashtags used by activists and allies, or target activist groups as ‘overt threats,”