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UK Lawmakers Believe Facebook Knowingly Breached Users' Privacy, Competition Laws - Report
Daniyal Sohail Published February 18, 2019 | 04:32 PM
UK lawmakers from parliament's Digital, Culture, Media and Sport Committee have concluded that Facebook has intentionally violated users' privacy and competition laws in the United Kingdom by trading people's data to some application developers while preventing others from accessing the same information, the committee's report showed on Monday
LONDON (UrduPoint News / Sputnik - 18th February, 2019) UK lawmakers from parliament's Digital, Culture, Media and Sport Committee have concluded that Facebook has intentionally violated users' privacy and competition laws in the United Kingdom by trading people's data to some application developers while preventing others from accessing the same information, the committee's report showed on Monday.
"The company [Facebook] was willing to: override its users' privacy settings in order to transfer data to some app developers; to charge high prices in advertising to some developers, for the exchange of data, and starve some developers ... of that data ... It is evident that Facebook intentionally and knowingly violated both data privacy and anti-competition laws," the report, published on the official website of the UK parliament, said.
The committee members also urged authorities to launch a probe into the social network's practices related to the safety of people's private data and Facebook's possible involvement in unfair competition.
"By choosing not to appear before the Committee and by choosing not to respond personally to any of our invitations, Mark Zuckerberg has shown contempt towards both our Committee and the 'International Grand Committee' involving members from nine legislators from around the world," the lawmakers added.
The lawmakers also said that Facebook might have intentionally provided the UK authorities with misleading information regarding the results of the company's probe into Russia's alleged interference in elections abroad.
"We [committee members] are left with the impression that either [Facebook's policy director for the United Kingdom, middle East and Africa] Simon Milner and [Chief Technology Officer] Mike Schroepfer deliberately misled the Committee or they were deliberately not briefed by senior executives at Facebook about the extent of Russian interference in foreign elections," the report said.
The parliamentarians partially based their conclusions on an article published by The New York Times newspaper, which claimed that Facebook knew about alleged Russia-related suspicious activities on Facebook as early as 2016. Meanwhile, both Milner and Schroepfer denied having knowledge of the alleged interference when grilled by the committee in 2018.
Moreover, last February, Milner said in a letter to the committee chair that Facebook experts did not find any indications of active Russia-linked advertising on the social network ahead of the 2016 Brexit referendum.
The lawmakers' based their evidence on Facebook's internal emails and messages obtained from Six4Three, a now-defunct application, which sued the tech giant in 2018 for using unfair competition practices and creating a scheme to boost the network's ability to access user data.
Six4Three went out of business in 2015 after Facebook made changes to the platform to prevent users from sharing their friends' data with developers but granted some applications a short extension, of which Six4Three was not a part.
Facebook, in turn, denied ever selling users' personal data and insisted that the leaked documents were taken out of context.
Russia has repeatedly refuted claims of Moscow's interference in foreign elections, saying that the allegations were never substantiated and such actions would go against the principles of the Russian foreign policy.
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