Photo: AFPLost amid a flurry of Facebook announcements about privacy settings and data access is a much more fundamental question: Is Facebook really changing its relationship with users, or just tinkering around the edges of a deeper problem — its insatiable appetite for the data it uses to sell ads? But it’s not at all clear how much Facebook can shift without undermining what makes it one of the world’s most profitable companies. Facebook is also restricting the access that outside parties have to data from Facebook users and groups, and it removed an option to search for users by entering a phone number or an email address that it said “malicious actors” had abused to scrape information from nearly all Facebook users. Zuckerberg has been unclear about whether Facebook would extend the European protections to the US and elsewhere. Privacy advocates are calling for Facebook to embrace the European rules globally.

Source: Mint April 10, 2018 06:45 UTC