28 November 2018 (Brussels, Belgium) — In my post yesterday I reviewed the big weekend story about the British MPs who made unprecedented use of Parliamentary powers to seize potentially damaging documents on Facebook. You can read that post here. Yesterday and today I tried to follow the UK Parliamentary hearing and the follow-up while bouncing between an AI event in Paris and the IAPP Europe Data Protection Congress in Brussels … which has been “GDPR-all-day-all-the-time”.
We did have several riviting discussions here … alas, all off-the-floor. Pity somebody had not organized an impromptu session but it was not permitted “under the rules”. You know those Europeans: sticklers for procedure over substance. We pretty much crucified Richard Allan (Facebook’s vice president of policy solutions) and his testimony. And it was easy. Just one example. Allan said Facebook never had full access to consumer data via the Facebook API. Wrong, dear Richard. Count 4 of the now infamous U.S. Federal Trade Commission complaint found precisely this: apps had unrestricted access to user profile information:
Anyway, the list goes on and on.
Yesterday, Richard Thompson, an editor at Wired magazine and a source for much of my “tech geek” stuff, published “Everything you need to know about Facebook’s UK drama” and it really is everything you need to know. Bit of a long read but worth your time. Just click here.