The company formerly known as Cambridge Analytica shocked the media today when it announced an immediate shutdown and liquidation of its business.

That “shutdown,” however, may be short-lived as official documents indicate those behind the controversial analytics company will be launching as a new firm with a less-toxic brand

Facebook still hasn’t launched a big privacy feature that Mark Zuckerberg promised more than seven months ago
https://www.recode.net/2018/12/17/18140062/facebook-clear-history-update-privacy-targeting-data-collection

“It’s taking longer than we initially had thought.”

Back in May, at the height of Facebook’s Cambridge Analytica privacy scandal, the company made a timely announcement: Facebook users would soon be able to clear the browsing history connected to their Facebook profile, meaning that the company would no longer link users to the apps and websites they visited off of the social network.

The product, called “Clear History,” got a lot of attention. Not only is browsing data important — Facebook uses it to target people with advertising — but CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced Clear History himself during Facebook’s annual developer conference. Clear History was an olive branch meant to show everyone how serious Facebook is about privacy.

The U.K. Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) has confirmed that it has hit Facebook with a maximum £500,000 ($645,000) fine around the way it mishandled user data following the Cambridge Analytica scandal earlier this year.

While £500,000 is a drop in the ocean for the U.S. company, it represents the maximum allowable punishment under UK law, which is the significant part to focus on here.

The introduction of GDPR has given the ICO the power to issue fines of up to £17 million ($22 million) or four percent of a company’s global turnover — that’s potentially up to $1.6 billion in Facebook’s case.

Sheryl Sandberg’s New Job Is to Fix Facebook’s Reputation—and Her Own
https://www.wsj.com/articles/sheryl-sandberg-leans-into-a-gale-of-bad-news-at-facebook-1536085230

Amid questions about her influence at the social network, the high-profile executive has been asked to tackle safety and security issues

Facebook Inc. FB -2.60% Chief Operating Officer Sheryl Sandberg was the architect of a business strategy that built the social network from a fast-growing but wobbly startup into a global advertising juggernaut with a market value of more than half a trillion dollars.

But during five nightmarish days in March, she and her communications team couldn’t figure out how to address the public’s mounting outrage over allegations that political firm Cambridge Analytica had improperly accessed data on tens of millions of Facebook users. While anger grew, she and Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg remained silent.

Facebook announced today that it had banned the app myPersonality for improper data controls and suspended hundreds more. So far this is only the second app to be banned as a result of the company’s large-scale audit begun in March; but as myPersonality hasn’t been active since 2012, and was to all appearances a legitimate academic operation, it’s a bit of a mystery why they bothered.

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Facebook finally hands over leave campaign Brexit ads
Natasha Lomas
@riptari / 4 hours ago

brexit
The UK parliament has provided another telling glimpse behind the curtain of Facebook’s unregulated ad platform by publishing data on scores of pro-Brexit adverts which it distributed to UK voters during the 2016 referendum on European Union membership. The ads were run on behalf of several vote leave campaigns who paid a third company to use Facebook’s ad targeting tools.

The ads were run prior to Facebook having any disclosure rules for political ads. So there was no way for anyone other than each target recipient to know a particular ad existed or who it was being targeted at.

The targeting of the ads was carried out on Facebook’s platform by AggregateIQ, a Canadian data firm that has been linked to Cambridge Analytica/SCL — aka the political consultancy at the center of a massive Facebook data misuse storm,