San Francisco, United States: Social Media Giant Facebook is embattled in a scandal over the illegal mishandling of user data, and on Monday it officially confirmed that it also collected information from people beyond their social network use. The CEO of the Network, Mark Zuckerberg was recently called by the US Congress last week to explain the issue. The Facebook chief had explained that Facebook collects data beyond what users share on their general profiles.
“When you visit a site or app that uses our services, we receive information even if you’re logged out or don’t have a Facebook account,” product management director David Baser said in a post on the social network’s blog. “This is because other apps and sites don’t know who is using Facebook,” he added while noting that Facebook was also following up with US Congress on a few dozen questions posed by them and Zuckerberg was unable to answer at the time of the hearings.
According to Baser, many websites and apps us Facebook services to target content and ads which also includes social network’s Like and Share buttons. When people log in to their Facebook accounts to log into another website or app, the Social Network collects crucial information from their online behaviour.
But he went on to stress that the practice was widespread by citing the example of other internet giants like Google and Twitter for doing the same. “Most websites and apps send the same information to multiple companies each time you visit them,” the post said. “There are three main ways in which Facebook uses the information we get from other websites and apps: providing our services to these sites or apps; improving safety and security on Facebook; and enhancing our products and services.”
“I want to be clear: We don’t sell people’s data. Period.” Zuckerberg says Facebook “failed” to protect users’ information following the use by Cambridge Analytica of data scraped from about 87 million Facebook users to target political ads ahead of the 2016 US presidential election.
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