Facebook has quiet shift its concealment standard for unopen groups to eliminate the option of manually catch members ’ individual entropy and after it imperil legal activity , a Chrome wing that made it potential to download the details of all group members at once has been shuttered . But the question of why this was possible in the first station still lingers .
grant toCNBC , the privacy loophole was still in place as late as last month . It came to the outlet ’s attention through the story of Andrea Downing , a moderator for a shut group that provides a gathering place for women who have a particular gene mutation ( BRCA ) that place them at high-pitched risk of boob cancer . From the written report :
Downing said women who join the BRCA Sisterhood Facebook group are often plow with private issues that make them feel vulnerable , and societal media had tender an inviting way to share their stories well with other women experiencing the same concerns . secrecy has always been top - of - judgement for the Sisterhood residential area and other mathematical group and others that cater toward BRCA - positive women , she said , because member put up pictures of surgical subroutine and partake private history of their experiences managing the health matter .
down grew concerned about the privateness of group appendage when she discover an propagation for the Chrome web web web browser called Grouply.io , which she saw could allow her to easily download names , employer , locations , email addresses and other personal point of all 9,000 multitude who had sign up for the grouping .
Though member ’ personal expectation of privacy is enough to make headache , Downing also had very existent concerns about member potentially being discriminated against by insurance firm or targeted by other corporate interests . She attain out to Fred Trotter , a security researcher who focus on health care data , to get a professional legal opinion on whether she should be worried .
Trotter corroborate her fear that theGrouplyextension was designed for marketers to chop-chop scoop up fellow member ’ individual detail like name , employers , locations , and email address . A user of the extension would still have to realise membership to the group , according to onlinehow - to guides .
The Grouply app is no longer useable , and all information has been scrubbed from itswebsite . No one from the company responded to our request for comment .
In late May , Trotter contacted Facebook about the issue , and a month later he received a response that explain it is possible to manually view member of secret radical , but the power to download the full listing with personal detail was not one of Facebook ’s feature — even though the feature was uncommitted to third party like Grouply . The reply read in part :
Our Groups team has been exploring potential changes related to group rank and privacy controls for groups , with the goal of understanding whether providing different options can well adjust the controls with the expectations of group administrator and member . That work is ongoing and may lead to changes that address some of your concern go forward .
On June 26 , the group state their concerns with Facebook ’s response ; three days later , the company ’s policy had modify .
We reached out to Facebook to ask exactly when its approach to secret groups changed , why this was a feature in the first plaza , and if it had notified the public about the change in any way . We did not receive an immediate reply , but a interpreter did tell CNBC that the conclusion was made based on “ several factors , ” but that the BRCA Sisterhood Facebook radical was n’t one of them .
The combination of users being incognizant of their privacy danger on Facebook and the companiespermissive approachto third - party access to data is a unceasing issue . The fact that private groups ca n’t even have a sane expected value of privacy is a peculiarly effective demonstration of the stratum of trust users should pass on over to the net .
[ CNBC ]
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