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Facebook has reached a settlement with the UK’s data protection watchdog, the ICO, agreeing to pay in full a £500,000 (~$643k) fine following the latter’s investigating into the Cambridge Analytica data misuse scandal.
As part of the arrangement Facebook has agreed to drop its legal appeal against the penalty. But under the terms of the settlement it has not admitted any liability in relation to paying the fine, which is the maximum possible monetary penalty under the applicable UK data protection law. (The Cambridge Analytica scandal predates Europe’s GDPR framework coming into force.)
Facebook’s appeal against the ICO’s penalty was focused on a claim that there was no evidence that U.K. Facebook users’ data had being mis-used by Cambridge Analytica.
But there’s a further twist here in that the company had secured a win, from a first tier legal tribunal — which held in June that “procedural fairness and allegations of bias” on the part of the ICO should be considered as part of its appeal.
The decision required the ICO to disclose materials relating to its decision-making process regarding the Facebook fine. The ICO, evidently less than keen for its emails to be trawled through, appealed last month. It’s now withdrawing the action as part of the settlement, Facebook having dropped its legal action.
In a statement laying out the bare bones of the settlement reached, the ICO writes: “The Commissioner considers that this agreement best serves the interests of all UK data subjects who are Facebook users. Both Facebook and the ICO are committed to continuing to work to ensure compliance with applicable data protection laws.”
An ICO spokeswoman did not respond to additional questions — telling us it does not have anything further to add than its public statement.
As part of the settlement, the ICO writes that Facebook is being allowed to retain some (unspecified) “documents” that the ICO had disclosed during the appeal process — to use for “other purposes”, including for furthering its own investigation into issues around Cambridge Analytica.
“Parts of this investigation had previously been put on hold at the ICO’s direction and can now resume,” the ICO adds.
Under the terms of the settlement the ICO and Facebook each pay their own legal costs. While the £500k fine is not kept by the ICO but paid to HM Treasury’s consolidated fund.
Commenting in a statement, deputy commissioner, James Dipple-Johnstone, said:
The ICO welcomes the agreement reached with Facebook for the withdrawal of their appeal against our Monetary Penalty Notice and agreement to pay the fine. The ICO’s main concern was that UK citizen data was exposed to a serious risk of harm. Protection of personal information and personal privacy is of fundamental importance, not only for the rights of individuals, but also as we now know, for the preservation of a strong democracy. We are pleased to hear that Facebook has taken, and will continue to take, significant steps to comply with the fundamental principles of data protection. With this strong commitment to protecting people’s personal information and privacy, we expect that Facebook will be able to move forward and learn from the events of this case.
In its own supporting statement, attached to the ICO’s remarks, Harry Kinmonth, director and associate general counsel at Facebook, added:
We are pleased to have reached a settlement with the ICO. As we have said before, we wish we had done more to investigate claims about Cambridge Analytica in 2015. We made major changes to our platform back then, significantly restricting the information which app developers could access. Protecting people’s information and privacy is a top priority for Facebook, and we are continuing to build new controls to help people protect and manage their information. The ICO has stated that it has not discovered evidence that the data of Facebook users in the EU was transferred to Cambridge Analytica by Dr Kogan. However, we look forward to continuing to cooperate with the ICO’s wider and ongoing investigation into the use of data analytics for political purposes.
A charitable interpretation of what’s gone on here is that both Facebook and the ICO have reached a stalemate where their interests are better served by taking a quick win that puts the issue to bed, rather than dragging on with legal appeals that might also have raised fresh embarrassments.
That’s quick wins in terms of PR (a paid fine for the ICO; and drawing a line under the issue for Facebook), as well as (potentially) useful data to further Facebook’s internal investigation of the Cambridge Analytica scandal.
We don’t know exactly it’s getting from the ICO’s document stash. But we do know it’s facing a number of lawsuits and legal challenges over the scandal in the US.
The ICO announced its intention to fine Facebook over the Cambridge Analytica scandal just over a year ago.
In March 2018 it had raided the UK offices of the now defunct data company, after obtaining a warrant, taking away hard drives and computers for analysis. It had also earlier ordered Facebook to withdraw its own investigators from the company’s offices.
Speaking to a UK parliamentary committee a year ago the information commissioner, Elizabeth Denham, and deputy Dipple-Johnstone, discussed their (then) ongoing investigation of data seized from Cambridge Analytica — saying they believed the Facebook user data-set the company had misappropriated could have been passed to more entities than were publicly known.
The ICO said at that point it was looking into “about half a dozen” entities.
It also told the committee it had evidence that, even as recently as early 2018, Cambridge Analytica might have retained some of the Facebook data — despite having claimed it had deleted everything.
“The follow up was less than robust. And that’s one of the reasons that we fined Facebook £500,000,” Denham also said at the time.
Some of this evidence will likely be very useful for Facebook as it prepares to defend itself in legal challenges related to Cambridge Analytica. As well as aiding its claimed platform audit — when, in the wake of the scandal, Facebook said it would run a historical app audit and challenge all developers who it determined had downloaded large amounts of user data.
The audit, which it announced in March 2018, apparently remains ongoing.
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It’s a year since the European Commission got a bunch of adtech giants together to spill ink on a voluntary Code of Practice to do something — albeit, nothing very quantifiable — as a first step to stop the spread of disinformation online.
Its latest report card on this voluntary effort sums to the platforms could do better.
The Commission said the same in January. And will doubtless say it again. Unless or until regulators grasp the nettle of online business models that profit by maximizing engagement. As the saying goes, lies fly while the truth comes stumbling after. So attempts to shrink disinformation without fixing the economic incentives to spread BS in the first place are mostly dealing in cosmetic tweaks and optics.
Signatories to the Commission’s EU Code of Practice on Disinformation are: Facebook, Google, Twitter, Mozilla, Microsoft and several trade associations representing online platforms, the advertising industry, and advertisers — including the Internet Advertising Bureau (IAB) and World Federation of Advertisers (WFA).
In a press release assessing today’s annual reports, compiled by signatories, the Commission expresses disappointment that no other Internet platforms or advertising companies have signed up since Microsoft joined as a late addition to the Code this year.
“We commend the commitment of the online platforms to become more transparent about their policies and to establish closer cooperation with researchers, fact-checkers and Member States. However, progress varies a lot between signatories and the reports provide little insight on the actual impact of the self-regulatory measures taken over the past year as well as mechanisms for independent scrutiny,” write commissioners Věra Jourová, Julian King, and Mariya Gabriel said in a joint statement. [emphasis ours]
“While the 2019 European Parliament elections in May were clearly not free from disinformation, the actions and the monthly reporting ahead of the elections contributed to limiting the space for interference and improving the integrity of services, to disrupting economic incentives for disinformation, and to ensuring greater transparency of political and issue-based advertising. Still, large-scale automated propaganda and disinformation persist and there is more work to be done under all areas of the Code. We cannot accept this as a new normal,” they add.
The risk, of course, is that the Commission’s limp-wristed code risks rapidly cementing a milky jelly of self-regulation in the fuzzy zone of disinformation as the new normal, as we warned when the Code launched last year.
The Commission continues to leave the door open (a crack) to doing something platforms can’t (mostly) ignore — i.e. actual regulation — saying it’s assessment of the effectiveness of the Code remains ongoing.
But that’s just a dangled stick. At this transitionary point between outgoing and incoming Commissions, it seems content to stay in a ‘must do better’ holding pattern. (Or: “It’s what the Commission says when it has other priorities,” as one source inside the institution put it.)
A comprehensive assessment of how the Code is working is slated as coming in early 2020 — i.e. after the new Commission has taken up its mandate. So, yes, that’s the sound of the can being kicked a few more months on.
Summing up its main findings from signatories’ self-marked ‘progress’ reports, the outgoing Commission says they have reported improved transparency between themselves vs a year ago on discussing their respective policies against disinformation.
But it flags poor progress on implementing commitments to empower consumers and the research community.
“The provision of data and search tools is still episodic and arbitrary and does not respond to the needs of researchers for independent scrutiny,” it warns.
This is ironically an issue that one of the signatories, Mozilla, has been an active critic of others over — including Facebook, whose political ad API it reviewed damningly this year, finding it not fit for purpose and “designed in ways that hinders the important work of researchers, who inform the public and policymakers about the nature and consequences of misinformation”. So, er, ouch.
The Commission is also critical of what it says are “significant” variations in the scope of actions undertaken by platforms to implement “commitments” under the Code, noting also differences in implementation of platform policy; cooperation with stakeholders; and sensitivity to electoral contexts persist across Member States; as well as differences in EU-specific metrics provided.
But given the Code only ever asked for fairly vague action in some pretty broad areas, without prescribing exactly what platforms were committing themselves to doing, nor setting benchmarks for action to be measured against, inconsistency and variety is really what you’d expect. That and the can being kicked down the road.
The Code did extract one quasi-firm commitment from signatories — on the issue of bot detection and identification — by getting platforms to promise to “establish clear marking systems and rules for bots to ensure their activities cannot be confused with human interactions”.
A year later it’s hard to see clear sign of progress on that goal. Although platforms might argue that what they claim is increased effort toward catching and killing malicious bot accounts before they have a chance to spread any fakes is where most of their sweat is going on that front.
Twitter’s annual report, for instance, talks about what it’s doing to fight “spam and malicious automation strategically and at scale” on its platform — saying its focus is “increasingly on proactively identifying problematic accounts and behaviour rather than waiting until we receive a report”; after which it says it aims to “challenge… accounts engaging in spammy or manipulative behavior before users are exposed to misleading, inauthentic, or distracting content”.
So, in other words, if Twitter does this perfectly — and catches every malicious bot before it has a chance to tweet — it might plausibly argue that bot labels are redundant. Though it’s clearly not in a position to claim it’s won the spam/malicious bot war yet. Ergo, its users remain at risk of consuming inauthentic tweets that aren’t clearly labeled as such (or even as ‘potentially suspect’ by Twitter). Presumably because these are the accounts that continue slipping under its bot-detection radar.
There’s also nothing in Twitter’s report about it labelling even (non-malicious) bot accounts as bots — for the purpose of preventing accidental confusion (after all satire misinterpreted as truth can also result in disinformation). And this despite the company suggesting a year ago that it was toying with adding contextual labels to bot accounts, at least where it could detect them.
In the event it’s resisted adding any more badges to accounts. While an internal reform of its verification policy for verified account badges was put on pause last year.
Facebook’s report also only makes a passing mention of bots, under a section sub-headed “spam” — where it writes circularly: “Content actioned for spam has increased considerably, since we found and took action on more content that goes against our standards.”
It includes some data-points to back up this claim of more spam squashed — citing a May 2019 Community Standards Enforcement report — where it states that in Q4 2018 and Q1 2019 it acted on 1.8 billion pieces of spam in each of the quarters vs 737 million in Q4 2017; 836 million in Q1 2018; 957 million in Q2 2018; and 1.2 billion in Q3 2018.
Though it’s lagging on publishing more up-to-date spam data now, noting in the report submitted to the EC that: “Updated spam metrics are expected to be available in November 2019 for Q2 and Q3 2019″ — i.e. conveniently late for inclusion in this report.
Facebook’s report notes ongoing efforts to put contextual labels on certain types of suspect/partisan content, such as labelling photos and videos which have been independently fact-checked as misleading; labelling state-controlled media; and labelling political ads.
Labelling bots is not discussed in the report — presumably because Facebook prefers to focus attention on self-defined spam-removal metrics vs muddying the water with discussion of how much suspect activity it continues to host on its platform, either through incompetence, lack of resources or because it’s politically expedient for its business to do so.
Labelling all these bots would mean Facebook signposting inconsistencies in how it applies its own policies –in a way that might foreground its own political bias. And there’s no self-regulatory mechanism under the sun that will make Facebook fess up to such double-standards.
For now, the Code’s requirement for signatories to publish an annual report on what they’re doing to tackle disinformation looks to be the biggest win so far. Albeit, it’s very loosely bound self-reporting. While some of these ‘reports’ don’t even run to a full page of A4-text — so set your expectations accordingly.
The Commission has published all the reports here. It has also produced its own summary and assessment of them (here).
“Overall, the reporting would benefit from more detailed and qualitative insights in some areas and from further big-picture context, such as trends,” it writes. “In addition, the metrics provided so far are mainly output indicators rather than impact indicators.”
Of the Code generally — as a “self-regulatory standard” — the Commission argues it has “provided an opportunity for greater transparency into the platforms’ policies on disinformation as well as a framework for structured dialogue to monitor, improve and effectively implement those policies”, adding: “This represents progress over the situation prevailing before the Code’s entry into force, while further serious steps by individual signatories and the community as a whole are still necessary.”
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Nearly a year and a half after the Cambridge Analytica scandal reportedly scuttled Facebook’s fledgling attempts to enter the healthcare market, the social media giant is launching a tool called “Preventive Health” to prompt its users to get regular checkups and connect them to service providers.
The architect of the new service is Dr. Freddy Abnousi, the head of the company’s healthcare research, who was previously linked to an earlier skunkworks initiative that would collect anonymized hospital data and use a technique called “hashing” to match the data to individuals that exist in both data sets — for research, according to CNBC reporting.
Working with the American Cancer Society; the American College of Cardiology; the American Heart Association; and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Facebook is developing a series of digital prompts that will encourage users to get a standard battery of tests that’s important to ensure health for populations of a certain age.
The company’s initial focus is on the top two leading causes of death in the U.S.: heart disease and cancer — along with the flu, which affects millions of Americans each year.
“Heart disease is the number one killer of men and women around the world and in many cases it is 100% preventable. By incorporating prevention reminders into platforms people are accessing every day, we’re giving people the tools they need to be proactive about their heart health,” said Dr. Richard Kovacs, the president of the American College of Cardiology, in a statement.
Users who want to access Facebook’s Preventive Health tools can search in the company’s mobile app to find which checkups are recommended by the company’s partner organizations based on the age and gender of a user.
The tool allows Facebookers to mark when the tests are completed, set reminders to schedule future tests and tell people in their social network about the tool.
Facebook will even direct users to resources on where to have the tests. One thing that the company will not do, Facebook assures potential users, is collect the results of any test.
“Health is particularly personal, so we took privacy and safety into account from the beginning. For example, Preventive Health allows you to set reminders for your future checkups and mark them as done, but it doesn’t provide us, or the health organizations we’re working with, access to your actual test results,” the company wrote in a statement. “Personal information about your activity in Preventive Health is not shared with third parties, such as health organizations or insurance companies, so it can’t be used for purposes like insurance eligibility.”
The company said that people can also use the new health tool to find locations that administer flu shots.
“Flu vaccines can have wide-ranging benefits beyond just preventing the disease, such as reducing the risk of hospitalization, preventing serious medical events for some people with chronic diseases, and protecting women during and after pregnancy,” said Dr. Nancy Messonnier, Director, National Center for Immunization and Respiratory Diseases, CDC, in a statement. “New tools like this will empower users with instant access to information and resources they need to become a flu fighter in their own communities.”
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