Facebook: We can now say more on user surveillance

[EC]

Via AP: http://bigstory.ap.org/article/facebook-we-can-now-say-more-user-surveillance

MENLO PARK, Calif. (AP) — Facebook's top attorney says after a week of negotiations with national security officials, the company is allowed to make new revelations about government orders for user data.

General Counsel Ted Ullyot said in a statement Friday that Facebook is only allowed to talk about total numbers, but is lobbying to reveal more, and the permission received is still unprecedented.

Following the guidelines, Ullyot says Facebook received between 9,000 and 10,000 requests from government entities in the last six months of 2012, on subjects from missing children to terrorist threats.

In a rare alliance, Facebook, Google and Microsoft Corp. are pressuring the Obama administration to loosen their legal gag on government surveillance orders.

The companies are seeking to distance themselves from the Internet dragnet code-named "PRISM" revealed in leaks last week.

Too short to except.

[mountaineer]

http://www.nypost.com/p/news/national/facebook_exposes_million_users_phone_uoa5o2rSXYJQO5vtpdLmeP

Facebook exposes 6 million users' phone numbers in tech glitch
 June 22, 2013

 
SAN FRANCISCO -- Facebook Inc has inadvertently exposed 6 million users' phone numbers and email addresses to unauthorized viewers over the past year, the world's largest social networking company disclosed late Friday.

Facebook blamed the data leaks, which began in 2012, on a technical glitch in its massive archive of contact information collected from its 1.1 billion users worldwide. As a result of the glitch, Facebook users who downloaded contact data for their list of friends obtained additional information that they were not supposed to have.

Facebook's security team was alerted to the bug last week and fixed it within 24 hours. But Facebook did not publicly acknowledge the bug until Friday afternoon, when it published an "important message" on its blog explaining the issue.

A Facebook spokesman said the delay was due to company procedure stipulating that regulators and affected users be notified before making a public announcement.

"We currently have no evidence that this bug has been exploited maliciously and we have not received complaints from users or seen anomalous behavior on the tool or site to suggest wrongdoing," Facebook said on its blog.

While the privacy breach was limited, "it's still something we're upset and embarrassed by, and we'll work doubly hard to make sure nothing like this happens again," it added.

The breach follows recent disclosures that several consumer Internet companies turned over troves of user data to a large-scale electronic surveillance program run by U.S. intelligence.

The companies include Facebook, Google Inc, Microsoft Corp, Apple Inc and Yahoo Inc.

The companies, led by Facebook, successfully negotiated with the U.S. government last week to reveal the approximate number of user information requests that each company had received, including secret national security orders.

[Atomic Cow]

Just another reason to never, ever use Facebook.