Report: Facebook’s Business Model Could Clash with Third-Party App Audit Promise

Massive strategic partnerships might prevent Facebook from upholding their promise to audit all third-party applications for user data leakage.

Facebook head Mark Zuckerberg promised during his congressional testimony that his company would perform an audit of all third-party applications on the platform. The purpose of this? To ensure that none of the active third-party applications were selling or exploiting users’ private data.

A recent report from the New York Times suggests that private strategic partnerships between Facebook and other companies implicate the social media giant, not just the third-party application developers, in spreading users’ data without their knowledge. The Times obtained documents that show Facebook’s agreements to provide user data to outside companies.

The special arrangements are detailed in hundreds of pages of Facebook documents obtained by The New York Times. The records, generated in 2017 by the company’s internal system for tracking partnerships, provide the most complete picture yet of the social network’s data-sharing practices. They also underscore how personal data has become the most prized commodity of the digital age, traded on a vast scale by some of the most powerful companies in Silicon Valley and beyond.

Facebook agreed in 2011 to an arrangement with the Federal Trade Commission, which forces Facebook to undergo an external audit of their privacy policies and practices every two years.

Earlier this year, Facebook announced that an audit by PriceWaterhouseCoopers revealed that Facebook does not provide user data to third-party applications. The tech community expressed skepticism of this audit upon its publication, specifically because Facebook new that data-mining firm Cambridge Analytica had accessed personal data from millions of users.

In October, members of the E.U. parliament called for an audit of Facebook’s practices and an overhaul of E.U. competition law.