{"id":108606,"date":"2018-04-02T12:01:52","date_gmt":"2018-04-02T11:01:52","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/?p=108606"},"modified":"2018-04-01T16:29:40","modified_gmt":"2018-04-01T15:29:40","slug":"as-feds-launch-probe-users-discover-horrifying-reach-of-facebooks-data-mining","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/2018\/04\/as-feds-launch-probe-users-discover-horrifying-reach-of-facebooks-data-mining\/","title":{"rendered":"As Feds Launch Probe, Users Discover ‘Horrifying’ Reach of Facebook’s Data Mining"},"content":{"rendered":"

Facebook “had the phone number of my late grandmother who never had a Facebook account, or even an email address,” one long-time user wrote after downloading an archive of her data from the platform.<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

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“I finally downloaded my Facebook data archive and the massive trove of data Facebook has collected from me over the past 12 years is fairly horrifying but so are the hundreds of snippets of messenger conversations from like 2009,” Maya Kosoff of Vanity Fair wrote.
(Photo: Recode)<\/p><\/div>\n

26 Mar 2018 – <\/em>As the fallout from Facebook’s Cambridge Analytica scandal<\/a> continued on Monday with the Federal Trade Commission’s (FTC) announcement that it is conducting a long-overdue<\/a> probe into the tech giant’s privacy practices, many Facebook users are only now discovering the astonishing and in some cases downright “creepy<\/a>” reach of the platform’s data-mining operations, which form the foundation of its business model<\/a>.<\/p>\n

After a New Zealand man named Dylan McKay called attention in a viral tweet<\/a> last week to the alarming fact that Facebook had collected his “entire call history” with his partner’s mother and “metadata about every text message [he’s] ever received or sent,” other Facebook users began downloading their archive of personal data the social media giant had stored and discovered that McKay’s experience was hardly anomalous.<\/p>\n

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Downloaded my facebook data as a ZIP file<\/p>\n

Somehow it has my entire call history with my partner's mum pic.twitter.com\/CIRUguf4vD<\/a><\/p>\n

— Dylan McKay (@dylanmckaynz) March 21, 2018<\/a><\/p><\/blockquote>\n