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By 17 April 2018 | Categories: news

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Ever since Facebook became embroiled in the Cambridge Analytica scandal, the company has tried to do as much damage control as possible, even prompting CEO Mark Zuckerberg to appear before the US Senate to answer questions over multiple days. The latest effort from Facebook is a blog post by product management director, David Baser.

In it, Baser tries to explain when, why and how the social media platform accesses and discards user data. Whatever his intention though, the overriding tone of the post seems to shift blame away from Facebook and rather say that data collection of sharing of user information is a common practice in the tech industry.

"Many companies offer these types of services and, like Facebook, they also get information from the apps and sites that use them. Twitter, Pinterest and LinkedIn all have similar Like and Share buttons to help people share things on their services. Google has a popular analytics service. And Amazon, Google and Twitter all offer login features. These companies — and many others — also offer advertising services. In fact, most websites and apps send the same information to multiple companies each time you visit them," notes Baser.

The ‘not just us’ approach from Facebook seems to try and frame their actions as normal and common practice. Whether or not it is the norm for the industry is irrelevant, as it is the fact that user data was disclosed without their knowledge, constituting a significant breach of privacy.

This is the issue that Facebook is missing, and given their actions, it doesn't look like much will change moving forward. Let us know you thoughts about their behaviour in the comments section below.

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