Facebook suspends another analytics firm amid questions over surveillance (theguardian.com).
The firm in question being Crimson Hexagon who use artificial intelligence and image analysis to monitor social media and provide an impressive list of blue chip clients with insights into public sentiment, collected more than 1tn public social media posts from Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Tumblr, and other sources. Their client list also including dubious contracts with the US government, a Russian not-for-profit with ties to the Kremlin, and the Turkish government.
On Friday the company had its access to the Facebook and Instagram APIs shut off after the Wall Street Journal queried Facebook about Crimson Hexagon’s contracts:
“We don’t allow developers to build surveillance tools using information from Facebook or Instagram. We take these allegations seriously, and we have suspended these apps while we investigate,” said a Facebook spokesman.
Facebook having introduced a policy banning developers from using public user data for surveillance in March 2017 but seemingly unwilling or unable to quite define what is meant by “surveilance”, and Crimson Hexagon’s chief technology officer Chris Bingham was keen to suggest that whatever does define it they were not selling it as a service despite the fact that F’book mentioned surveillance tools in their statement, saying:.
“Crimson Hexagon only allows government customers to use the platform for specific approved use cases; and under no circumstances is surveillance a permitted use case,” Bringham wrote.
Seemingly the Russian not-for-profit group mentioned used F’book users to study the Russian public’s perception of Vladimir Putin, while Turkey used it to study public reaction to its 2014 decision to block access to Twitter. As for the US government contracts, public information suggests they include the state department, the Federal Emergency Management Agency, the army, and the US Secret Service.
The definite mention of surveillance but indefinite definition of surveillance perhaps making some wonder if beyond Cambridge Analytica helping Ruskies to get Americans to elect the populist choice of demographic in Arse Elbow, Nebraska, somehow Facebook has helped society stray into the sort of scary preternatural digital parallel world exemplified by Scarfolk, the town in North West England that loops a hauntological dystopian public information poster 1970s ad infinitum (scarfolk.blogspot.com).
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