The Facebook Leak: clickbait or reality?

“We cannot confidently make controlled policy changes or external commitments such as ‘we will not use X data for Y purpose.’ And yet this is exactly what regulators expect us to do.” 

In the 15-page leaked document released today, Facebook admits (while playing dumb) that they “simply” don’t know what data they have. Privacy experts see the document as an admission to what we’ve been saying all along - that Facebook is not capable of complying with privacy regulations and they really have no control over the data they have. 

So here we have it - proof that even the largest social media platform in the world can’t comply with privacy regulations. 

So is this a big deal? Well, it’s easy to fixate on Facebook. It’s what we do. What’s not clear to us (besides the obvious issue of FB not being able to track data) is whether this is internal or external. 

This would be a big issue if they were leaking data externally and had no visibility on to whom it was being leaked to. If this is internal, then…who cares? 2.5 billion people’s data is not a trivial task to manage in a product that has evolved over almost two decades. As the largest in the space, should they have a better handle on this? Obviously, but it does not seem like this data is being used outside of FB - as far as we can tell. 

Reklaim is focused on the notion of consumer ownership of data. If companies had to come to the user for data vs. the way it is today with users having to give up data every time they enter a platform, this wouldn’t be a problem. We are adding more and more features to put this level of control and transparency at the foundation of what we are doing to change the way data is both collected and used in the future.