The Cambridge Analytica scandal has put Facebook on high alert and most of its major decisions in the past month have to do with improved privacy, examples being the new data abuse bounty program and suspension of marketers such as AggregateIQ and CubeYou who were also linked data abuse.
Those moves aside, the company has now turned to name-dropping business rivals Twitter and LinkedIn, which according to Facebook, also have a similar content sharing and user profiling mechanism.
And yes, Google was also mentioned for utilizing a popular analytics service, in a long explanatory post which can be categorized as a masked apology-cum-accusation that other companies also collect, or are capable of collecting, user data on a mass scale.
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.
Besides revealing details about how Facebook tracks non-users, Product Management Director, David Baser said,“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.”
Zuckerberg’s notes for his House and Senate hearings mentioned Apple’s location and data tracking as a possible rebuttal. And of course, it’s no secret that every major tech company collects data in one way or the other. So it’s clear that Facebook wants those investigating privacy breach claims to also turn their attention to other companies that are tracking users around the internet.
