Facebook did not read the terms and services of the app that improperly shared user data with Cambridge Analytica, the company's chief technology officer said Thursday.
"We require that people have a terms and conditions and we have an automated check there at the time — this was in 2014, maybe earlier," Mike Schroepfer told U.K. lawmakers at a parliamentary committee hearing. "We did not read all of the terms and conditions."
Aleksandr Kogan, a Cambridge University researcher, created an app that collected data on millions of Facebook users. Kogan's company, Global Science Research, then shared that data with political analytics firm Cambridge Analytica.
Kogan said on Tuesday that Facebook did not pull it up on its terms of services until after The Guardian newspaper reported early information about it harvesting user data.
Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg told U.S. lawmakers earlier this month that Kogan was "in violation" of his agreement with the platform and that this was a "big issue." But the data scientist hit back at the company's boss, arguing that tens of thousands of other developers were employing similar practices to his app.
The academic said Facebook's criticisms of him were likely the result of the social media giant undergoing "PR crisis mode."
tookMYshovelwithme on April 26th, 2018 at 13:12 UTC »
So companies like FaceBook, Apple and Google hide behind terms & conditions which are thousands upon thousands of words long. If they want to selectively punish someone or are protecting themselves, they use the excuse: all our customers read and agreed to the terms. When the same thing happens to them, even though they employ a battalion of lawyers, they act all straight faced and say "whoah whoah woah, we didn't actually read the entire T&C, have you ever looked at one of these things? They're as thick as a phone book and are intentionally convoluted!"
joshuaism on April 26th, 2018 at 13:11 UTC »
Doesn't facebook have lawyers who's job it is to read the pointless TOS for them?
CodeMonkey24 on April 26th, 2018 at 12:29 UTC »
Most ToS agreements are completely useless and invalid anyways. In most legal systems, contract law has a section that requires contracts to be "reasonably understandable". When the fully printed document for a ToS is over an inch thick on A4 paper using 9-point font, that is completely unreasonable. It would take the average person several hours to read.