The social network supplied data on location, interests, and friend groupings to phone carriers and manufacturers without users' permission – data that went far beyond mere technical specs. Users' activity on Facebook, Instagram and even Messenger was fair game for data-mining, and the platform encouraged and even assisted over 100 global telecoms to use customers' data for purposes including evaluating their creditworthiness, according to documents seen by the Intercept, which suggest the program is still going on.
Facebook data scientists working on its "Actionable Insights" program developed an algorithm to exclude customers with poor credit history from future promotions by a client, determining creditworthiness through users' online behavior, according to the document, which presented this case study as an example of what clients could achieve through the program. Such an algorithm, replicated across the platform through a targeting mechanism called "lookalike audiences" that lumps together users who share attributes, could allow Actionable Insights clients to negatively "profile" users, denying them services based on their failure to fulfill metrics they didn't even know existed, based on behavior they didn't know was being subject to surveillance
Actionable Insights was announced in August, at about the same time Facebook's secretive and possibly illegal data-sharing partnerships with other tech companies were being exposed – and while Facebook was insisting such non-consenting data-sharing was wholly in the company's past. Like the "trusted partnerships" program, Actionable Insights is ostensibly free, allowing Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg to continue to claim that Facebook doesn't "sell users' data" – but access was provided with the understanding that companies would purchase Facebook ads, now expertly targeted thanks to the user data they could access....read more>>>...
