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Instagram will let you download your content after criticism about portability
Yesterday we reported that Instagram lacked data portability, knocking the app for the absence of an equivalent to Facebook’s Download Your Information too. Now an Instagram spokesperson tells me “We are building a new data portability tool. You’ll soon be able to download a copy of what you’ve shared on Instagram, including your photos, videos and messages.”
This tool could make it much easier for users to leave Instagram and go to a competing image social network. And as long as it launches before May 25th, it will help Instagram to comply with upcoming European GDPR privacy law that requires data portability.
Instagram has historically made it very difficult to export your data. You can’t drag, or tap and hold on images to save them. And you can’t download images you’ve already posted. That’s despite Instagram now being almost 8 years old and having over 800 million users. For comparison, Facebook launched its Download Your Information tool in 2010, just six years after launch.
We’re awaiting more info on whether you’ll only be able to download your photos, videos, and messages; or if you’ll also be able to export your following and follower lists, Likes, comments, Stories, and the captions you share with posts. It’s also unclear whether photos and videos will export in the full fidelity that they’re uploaded or displayed in, or whether they’ll be compressed. Instagram told me “we’ll share more details very soon when we actually launch the tool. But at a high level it allows you to download and export what you have shared on Instagram” so we’ll have to wait for more clarity.
If Instagram does offer uncompressed downloads of the same image quality as it shows on its app, the Download Your Information tool could make unofficial third-party export apps like InstaPort obsolete. That would be a win for users since these apps are sometimes run by unscrupulous developers who could misuse your content or the Instagram login credentials you need to use them.
Portability could facilitate the rise of legitimate competitors to Instagram, or at least let users back up their content on an image storage app or their own computer. But still, it’s Instagram’s social graph and the data it’s gathered about your interests that help it tune its algorithm to show you the most relevant posts. This personalization moat can leave rivals with similar features unable to provide a similar level of service.
If Instagram wanted to truly level the playing field, it would let you export your social graph in a privacy-safe format that would let users find and follow those same people on a different app. But the announcement of this data portability tool is a much-needed first step to unlocking Instagram’s content vault.
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Zuckerberg’s boring testimony is a big win for Facebook
Mark Zuckerberg ran his apology scripts, trotted out his lists of policy fixes and generally dulled the Senate into submission. And that constitutes success for Facebook.
Zuckerberg testified before the joint Senate judiciary and commerce committee today, capitalizing on the lack of knowledge of the politicians and their surface-level questions. Half the time, Zuckerberg got to simply paraphrase blog posts and statements he’d already released. Much of the other half, he merely explained how basic Facebook functionality works.
The senators hadn’t done their homework, but he had. All that training with D.C. image consultants paid off.
Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg arrives to testify before a joint hearing of the US Senate Commerce, Science and Transportation Committee and Senate Judiciary Committee on Capitol Hill, April 10, 2018 in Washington, DC. (Photo: JIM WATSON/AFP/Getty Images)
Sidestepping any gotcha questions or meme-worthy sound bites, Zuckerberg’s repetitive answers gave the impression that there’s little left to uncover, whether or not that’s true. He made a convincing argument that Facebook is atoning for its sins, is cognizant of its responsibility and has a concrete plan in place to improve data privacy.
With just five minutes per senator, and them each with a queue of questions to get through, few focused on the tougher queries, and even fewer had time for follow-ups to dig for real answers.
Did Facebook cover up the Cambridge Analytica scandal or decide against adding privacy protections earlier to protect its developer platform? Is it a breach of trust for Zuckerberg and other executives to have deleted their Facebook messages out of recipients’ inboxes? How has Facebook used a lack of data portability to inhibit the rise of competitors? Why doesn’t Instagram let users export their data the way they can from Facebook?
The public didn’t get answers to any of those questions today. Just Mark’s steady voice regurgitating Facebook’s talking points. Investors rewarded Facebook for its monotony with a 4.5 percent share price boost.
That’s not to say today’s hearing wasn’t effective. It’s just that the impact was felt before Zuckerberg waded through a hundred photographers to take his seat in the Senate office.
Facebook knew this day was coming, and worked to build Zuckerberg a fortress of facts he could point to no matter what he got asked:
- Was Facebook asleep at the wheel during the 2016 election? Yesterday it revealed it had deleted the accounts of Russian GRU intelligence operatives in June 2016.
- How will Facebook prevent this from happening again? Last week it announced plans to require identity and location verification for any political advertiser or popular Facebook Page, and significantly restricted its developer platform.
- Is Facebook taking this seriously? Zuckerberg wrote in his prepared testimony for today that Facebook is doubling its security and content moderation team from 10,000 to 20,000, and that “protecting our community is more important than maximizing our profits.”
- Is Facebook sorry? “We didn’t take a broad enough view of what our responsibility is and that was a huge mistake. That was my mistake,” Zuckerberg has said, over and over.
Facebook may never have made such sweeping changes and apologies had it not had today and tomorrow’s testimony on the horizon. But this defensive strategy also led to few meaningful disclosures, to the detriment of the understanding of the public and the Senate — and to the benefit of Facebook.
WASHINGTON, DC – APRIL 10: Facebook co-founder, Chairman and CEO Mark Zuckerberg testifies before a combined Senate Judiciary and Commerce committee hearing in the Hart Senate Office Building on Capitol Hill April 10, 2018 in Washington, DC. Zuckerberg, 33, was called to testify after it was reported that 87 million Facebook users had their personal information harvested by Cambridge Analytica, a British political consulting firm linked to the Trump campaign. (Photo by Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images)
We did learn that Facebook is working with Special Counsel Robert Mueller on his investigation into election interference. We learned that Zuckerberg thinks it was a mistake not to suspend the advertising account of Cambridge Analytica when Facebook learned it had bought user data from Dr. Aleksandr Kogan. And we learned that the senate will “haul in” Cambridge Analytica for a future hearing about data privacy.
None of those are earth-shaking.
Perhaps the only fireworks during the testimony came when Senator Ted Cruz laid into Zuckerberg over the Gizmodo report citing that Facebook’s trending topics curators suppressed conservative news trends. Cruz badgered Zuckerberg about whether he believes Facebook is politically neutral, whether Facebook has ever taken down Pages from liberal groups like Planned Parenthood or MoveOn.org, if he knows the political leanings of Facebook’s content moderators and whether Facebook fired Oculus co-founder Palmer Luckey over his [radical conservative] political views.
Zuckerberg maintained that he and Facebook are neutral, but that last question was the only one of the day that seemed to visibly perturb him. “That is a specific personnel matter than seems like it would be inappropriate…” Zuckerberg said before Cruz interrupted, pushing the CEO to exasperatedly respond, “Well then I can confirm that it was not because of a political view.” It should be noted that Cruz has received numerous campaign donations from Luckey.
Full exchange between Senator @tedcruz and Mark Zuckerberg where Senator Ted Cruz questions the Facebook CEO about the censorship of Conservatives on his platform. pic.twitter.com/c6d7jwDbnJ
— The Columbia Bugle
(@ColumbiaBugle) April 10, 2018
This was the only time Zuckerberg seemed flapped, because he knows the stakes of the public perception of Facebook’s political leanings. Zuckerberg, many Facebook employees and Facebook’s home state of California are all known to lean left. But if the company itself is seen that way, conservative users could flee, shattering Facebook’s network effect. Yet again, Zuckerberg nimbly avoided getting cornered here, and was aided by the bell signaling the end of Cruz’s time. He never noticeably raised his voice, lashed back at the senators or got off message.
By the conclusion of the five hours of questioning, the senators themselves were admitting they hadn’t watched the day’s full testimony. Viewers at home had likely returned to their lives. Even the press corps’ eyes were glazing over. But Zuckerberg was prepared for the marathon. He maintained pace through the finish line. And he made it clear why marathons aren’t TV spectator sports.
The question is no longer what revelations would come from Mr. Zuckerberg going to Washington. Tomorrow’s testimony is likely to go similarly. It’s whether Facebook can coherently execute on the data privacy promises it made leading up to today. This will be a “never-ending battle” as Zuckerberg said, dragging out over many years. And again, that’s in Facebook’s interest. Because in the meantime, everyone’s going back to scrolling their feeds.
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Mark Zuckerberg: “We do not sell data to advertisers”
While many of us in the tech world are familiar with Facebook’s business model, there is a common misconception among people that Facebook collects information about you and then sells that information to advertisers.
Zuckerberg wants everyone (especially the U.S. Senate) to know that’s not the case, and has laid forth the most simple example to explain it.
During his testimony, the Facebook CEO clarified to Senator John Cornyn that Facebook does not sell data.
There is a very common misconception that we sell data to advertisers, and we do not sell data to advertisers. What we allow is for advertisers to tell us who they want to reach and then we do the placement. So, if an advertiser comes to us and says, ‘Alright, I’m a ski shop and I want to sell skis to women,’ then we might have some sense because people shared skiing related content or said they were interested in that. They shared whether they’re a woman. And then we can show the ads to the right people without that data ever changing hands and going to the advertiser. That’s a very fundamental part of how our model works and something that is often misunderstood.
While, again, this may seem straightforward to many of us, Zuckerberg found himself having to explain more than once that Facebook does not sell data during his Senate testimony.
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Zuckerberg admits it was a mistake not to ban Cambridge Analytica’s ads
Facebook didn’t ban Cambridge Analytica when it found out in 2015 that it had received user data from Dr. Aleksandr Kogan, and Zuckerberg called that a mistake during his testimony before the Senate. Cambridge Analytica has since been banned.
Zuckerberg explained that “I want to correct one thing that I said earlier in response to a question from Senator Leahy. He had asked why we didn’t ban Cambridge Analytica at the time when we learned of them in 2015. And I answered that what my understanding was was that they were not on the platform, were not an app developer or advertiser. When I went back and met with my team afterwards, they let me know that Cambridge Analytica actually did start as an advertiser later in 2015, so we could have in theory banned them back then, and made a mistake by not doing so.”
NEW YORK, NY – SEPTEMBER 19: CEO of Cambridge Analytica Alexander Nix speaks at the 2016 Concordia Summit – Day 1 at Grand Hyatt New York on September 19, 2016 in New York City. (Photo by Bryan Bedder/Getty Images for Concordia Summit)
When the Guardian informed Facebook about Kogan sharing user data to Cambridge Analytica, Facebook banned Kogan, and required Cambridge Analytica to formally certify that it had deleted all the improperly attained user data. Cambridge Analytica did so, Zuckerberg confirmed in his prepared testimony for today. But Facebook then stopped short of blocking Cambridge Analytica from buying ads on its platform. The company went on to work with the Trump campaign to help it optimize political messaging and ad targeting.
Had Facebook banned Cambridge Analytica at the time, it wouldn’t have been able to buy ads directly on behalf of political campaigns with which it worked. However, the company might still have been able to help these campaigns to optimize their ads, so a 2015 ban wouldn’t have necessarily prevented second-hand use of improperly attained data.
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Mark Zuckerberg: ‘There will always be a version of Facebook that is free’
Today during Mark Zuckerberg’s testimony before the Senate, the Facebook CEO reiterated that “there will always be a version of Facebook that is free.”
In the midst of the Cambridge Analytica scandal, in which the user data of up to 87 million people was sold by a third-party developer to Trump Campaign-linked firm Cambridge Analytica, there has been talk of Facebook potentially adding a subscription layer.
The scandal has brought to light the heart of a problem that many have been well aware of: if you’re not buying a product, you are the product.
Last week, when asked if there might be a way for users to opt out of being targeted for ads, Sandberg responded saying they’d have to pay for it.
“We have different forms of opt-out,” Sandberg replied. “We don’t have an opt-out at the highest level. That would be a paid product.”
Our own Josh Constine made an argument that ad-free subscriptions could save Facebook. And while there’s no word on an ad-free subscription, Zuckerberg did at least leave room for it in the future, noting that there will always be a version of Facebook that is free.
“How do you sustain a business model in which users don’t pay for your service?” Senator Orrin Hatch asked Zuckerberg.
“Senator, we run ads.”
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Instagram traps data without a Download Your Information tool
It’s hard to #DeleteFacebook with no viable alternative, but at least you can export all your data. There’s no such option on Instagram . That lack of data portability puts users at the mercy of Instagram’s product and policy decisions. And it could even put users at risk, as those who seek to back up their accounts and content are forced to use unofficial third-party apps that require their password.
Facebook launched its Download Your Information tool in 2010, six years after the social network launched. It lets you export a zip file of all your status updates, photos, profile info, messages, friend lists and a whole lot more. The idea is that if you wanted to ditch Facebook, you could take your data with you and get set up on some other social network. The fact that you only get a list of your friends’ names by default, not their email addresses or another way to easily find them on different apps, limits that power. But at least you get all the content you created.
Soon to be eight years old, Instagram still lacks its own version of Download Your Information. When asked about this, an Instagram spokesperson merely said, “Instagram does not currently have a data portability tool.”
Instagram doesn’t even offer a way to download your photos or videos after you share them to its feed. Unlike most apps and websites, you can’t just tap and hold on a photo to save it to your phone. The closest option is to use Instagram’s “share via email” feature, which sends a saveable version of an image. Otherwise, you need to set Instagram to save images when you post them.
Third-party tools have cropped up to fill the gap, but their security and privacy practices can be questionable. Vibbi InstaPort, Insta Saver, 4K Download and Picodash are a few. These services typically require you to log in with your Instagram credentials, which puts your username and password at risk of leaking to hackers. It’s also unclear what else could happen to your images once they export them. And the fact that some of these services, like InstaPort, offer to sell you Instagram followers too shows how scammy they can be. Perhaps the best bet for users is this open-sourced InstaLooter tool, but it requires some technical know-how to retrieve your photos and videos.
The rest of your profile information, photos you’re tagged in, people you follow or who follow you, your Likes and comments and any other Instagram data is all trapped in the app. The European GDPR privacy law goes into effect on May 25th, so Instagram may need to offer a data portability tool by then. Perhaps Congress should ask Zuckerberg about this during his testimonies over the next two days.
The problem is that without portability, there’s less chance of a legitimate rival to Instagram emerging. Snapchat’s ephemerality makes it too different. That absence means there’s nowhere to go if users are fed up with Instagram’s algorithm or other issues. This is partly why the #DeleteUber campaign peaked much higher in terms of Twitter mentions than #DeleteFacebook, despite having a much smaller user base. Those pissed at Uber could switch to Lyft without changing their behavior much. There’s no equivalent alternative to Facebook or Instagram.
#DeleteUber peaked higher than #DeleteFacebook because apps like Lyft give Uber users a viable alternative. An Instagram Download Your Information tool could promote competition.
The U.S. government may have been shortsighted to let Facebook acquire Instagram in 2012 for $715 million. Now at more than 800 million monthly users, Instagram joining Facebook led to a massive centralization of social networking that gives users fewer options. But even with the backlash against big tech and Facebook, it seems unlikely that the government has the resolve to break up Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp.
At the very least, Instagram should give users the ability to leave without losing their visual history. If Instagram and Facebook are going to remain united as one company, the same data portability tools should be available to both. That way, if someone actually did build a decent competitor, users could choose where they want to put their windows to the world. At the Download Your Information tool launch in 2010, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg himself said, “Stuff that you put into the site, you should be able to take out.”
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Watch Zuckerberg’s Senate testimony live right here
Today, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg will begin two of the most publicly scrutinized days of his career.
This afternoon, members of the Senate will hear from Zuckerberg on data use, protection and privacy in the midst of the Cambridge Analytica scandal and Russian election meddling. While Zuckerberg’s prepared statement has already been released to the public, there are plenty of lingering questions to be answered.
We’ll be watching diligently and bringing you all the breaking news and analysis from the hearing. But if you want to watch along yourself, here’s what you need to know:
The hearing begins at 2:15 pm ET.
It’s a joint hearing held by the Senate Judiciary Committee and Senate Committee on Commerce, Science and Transportation.
The hearing will be live streamed right here.
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Facebook demands ID verification for big Pages, ‘issue’ ad buyers
Facebook is looking to self-police by implementing parts of the proposed Honest Ads Act before the government tries to regulate it. To fight fake news and election interference, Facebook will require the admins of popular Facebook Pages and advertisers buying political or “issue” ads on “debated topics of national legislative importance” like education or abortion to verify their identity and location. Those that refuse, are found to be fraudulent or are trying to influence foreign elections will have their Pages prevented from posting to the News Feed or their ads blocked.
Meanwhile, Facebook plans to use this information to append a “Political Ad” label and “Paid for by” information to all election, politics and issue ads. Users can report any ads they think are missing the label, and Facebook will show if a Page has changed its name to thwart deception. Facebook started the verification process this week; users in the U.S. will start seeing the labels and buyer info later this spring, and Facebook will expand the effort to ads around the world in the coming months.
This verification and name change disclosure process could prevent hugely popular Facebook Pages from being built up around benign content, then sold to cheats or trolls who switch to sharing scams or misinformation.
Overall, it’s a smart start that comes way too late. As soon as Facebook started heavily promoting its ability to run influential election ads, it should have voluntarily adopted similar verification and labeling rules as traditional media. Instead, it was so focused on connecting people to politics, it disregarded how the connection could be perverted to power mass disinformation and destabilization campaigns.
“These steps by themselves won’t stop all people trying to game the system. But they will make it a lot harder for anyone to do what the Russians did during the 2016 election and use fake accounts and pages to run ads,” CEO Mark Zuckerberg wrote on Facebook. “Election interference is a problem that’s bigger than any one platform, and that’s why we support the Honest Ads Act. This will help raise the bar for all political advertising online.” You can see his full post below.
The move follows Twitter’s November announcement that it too would label political ads and show who purchased them.
Twitter’s mockup for its “Political” ad labels and “paid for by” information
Facebook also gave a timeline for releasing both its tools for viewing all ads run by Pages and to create a Political Ad Archive. A searchable index of all ads with the “political” label, including their images, text, target demographics and how much was spent on them, will launch in June and keep ads visible for four years after they run. Meanwhile, the View Ads tool that’s been testing in Canada will roll out globally in June so users can see any ad run by a Page, not just those targeted to them.
Facebook announced in October it would require documentation from election advertisers and label their ads, but now is applying those requirements to a much wider swath of ads that deal with big issues impacted by politics. That could protect users from disinformation and divisive content not just during elections, but any time bad actors are trying to drive wedges into society. Facebook wouldn’t reveal the threshold of followers that will trigger Pages needing verification, but confirmed it will not apply to small to medium-size businesses.
By self-regulating, Facebook may be able to take the wind out of calls for new laws that apply to online ads buyer disclosure rules on TV and other traditional media ads. Zuckerberg will testify before the U.S. Senate Judiciary and Commerce committees on April 10, as well as the House Energy and Commerce Committee on April 11. Having today’s announcement to point to could give him more protection against criticism during the hearings, though Congress will surely want to know why these safeguards weren’t in place already.
With important elections coming up in the US, Mexico, Brazil, India, Pakistan and more countries in the next year, one…
Posted by Mark Zuckerberg on Friday, April 6, 2018
For more on Facebook’s recent troubles, check out our feature stories:
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Zuckerberg will also testify before the Senate
Earlier this week, the House Energy and Commerce Committee announced that Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg is slated to testify on the use and protection of user data in Washington D.C. on April 11. Turns out, Zuckerberg will have a busier week in D.C. than expected, with the Senate Judiciary and Senate Commerce Committees announcing a joint hearing with the Facebook boss.
The Senate hearing will go down on April 10, a day before Zuckerberg appears before the House Committee.
The hearing, convened by Senate Committee on the Judiciary Chairman Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) and Senate Commerce, Science and Transportation Committee Chairman John Thune (R-S.D.), is titled “Facebook, Social Media Privacy, and the Use and Abuse of Data.”
The hearing will take place in the U.S. Capitol Visitors Center at 2:15pm ET.
Here’s what Senator Thune had to say in a prepared statement:
Facebook now plays a critical role in many social relationships, informing Americans about current events, and pitching everything from products to political candidates. Our joint hearing will be a public conversation with the CEO of this powerful and influential company about his vision for addressing problems that have generated significant concern about Facebook’s role in our democracy, bad actors using the platform, and user privacy.
Zuckerberg brought up the possibility of speaking to congress in late March, saying: “If it is ever the case that I am the most informed person at Facebook in the best position to testify, I will happily do that.”
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Facebook retracted Zuckerberg’s messages from recipients’ inboxes
You can’t remove Facebook messages from the inboxes of people you sent them to, but Facebook did that for Mark Zuckerberg and other executives. Three sources confirm to TechCrunch that old Facebook messages they received from Zuckerberg have disappeared from their Facebook inboxes, while their own replies to him conspicuously remain. An email receipt of a Facebook message from 2010 reviewed by TechCrunch proves Zuckerberg sent people messages that no longer appear in their Facebook chat logs or in the files available from Facebook’s Download Your Information tool.
When asked by TechCrunch about the situation, Facebook claimed in this statement it was done for corporate security:
“After Sony Pictures’ emails were hacked in 2014 we made a number of changes to protect our executives’ communications. These included limiting the retention period for Mark’s messages in Messenger. We did so in full compliance with our legal obligations to preserve messages.”
However, Facebook never publicly disclosed the removal of messages from users’ inboxes, nor privately informed the recipients. That raises the question of whether this was a breach of user trust. When asked that question directly over Messenger, Zuckerberg declined to provide a statement.
Tampering with users’ inboxes
A Facebook spokesperson confirmed to TechCrunch that users can only delete messages from their own inboxes, and that they would still show up in the recipient’s thread. There appears to be no “retention period” for normal users’ messages, as my inbox shows messages from as early as 2005. That indicates Zuckerberg and other executives received special treatment in being able to pull back previously sent messages.
[Update 4/6/2018: Facebook now says that it plans to launch an “unsend” feature for Facebook messages to all users in the next several months, and won’t let Mark Zuckerberg use that feature any more until it launches for everyone. One option Facebook is considering for the Unsend feature is an expiration timer users could set. But it’s alarming that Facebook didn’t disclose the retractions or plans for a Unsend button until forced, and scrambling to give everyone the feature seems like an effort to quiet users’ anger over the situation.]
Facebook chats sent by Zuckerberg from several years ago or older were missing from the inboxes of both former employees and non-employees. What’s left makes it look like the recipients were talking to themselves, as only their side of back-and-forth conversations with Zuckerberg still appear. Three sources asked to remain anonymous out of fear of angering Zuckerberg or burning bridges with the company.
[Update: Recent messages from Zuckerberg remain in users’ inboxes. Old messages from before 2014 still appear to some users, indicating the retraction did not apply to all chats the CEO sent. But more sources have come forward since publication, saying theirs disappeared, as well.]
None of Facebook’s terms of service appear to give it the right to remove content from users’ accounts unless it violates the company’s community standards. While it’s somewhat standard for corporations to have data retention policies that see them delete emails or other messages from their own accounts that were sent by employees, they typically can’t remove the messages from the accounts of recipients outside the company. It’s rare that these companies own the communication channel itself and therefore host both sides of messages as Facebook does in this case, which potentially warrants a different course of action with more transparency than quietly retracting the messages.
Facebook’s power to tamper with users’ private message threads could alarm some. The issue is amplified by the fact that Facebook Messenger now has 1.3 billion users, making it one of the most popular communication utilities in the world.
Zuckerberg is known to have a team that helps him run his Facebook profile, with some special abilities for managing his 105 million followers and constant requests for his attention. For example, Zuckerberg’s profile doesn’t show a button to add him as a friend on desktop, and the button is grayed out and disabled on mobile. But the ability to change the messaging inboxes of other users is far more concerning.
Facebook may have sought to prevent leaks of sensitive corporate communications. Following the Sony hack, emails of Sony’s president Michael Lynton, who sat on Snap Inc.’s board, were exposed, revealing secret acquisitions and strategy.
Mark Zuckerberg during the early days of Facebook
However, Facebook also may have looked to thwart the publication of potentially embarrassing personal messages sent by Zuckerberg or other executives. In 2010, Silicon Alley Insider aka Business Insider published now-infamous instant messages from a 19-year-old Zuckerberg to a friend shortly after starting The Facebook in 2004. “yea so if you ever need info about anyone at harvard . . . just ask . . . i have over 4000 emails, pictures, addresses, sns” Zuckerberg wrote to a friend. “what!? how’d you manage that one?” they asked. “people just submitted it . . i don’t know why . . . they ‘trust me’ . . . dumb fucks” Zuckerberg explained.
The New Yorker later confirmed the messages with Zuckerberg, who told the publication he “absolutely” regretted them. “If you’re going to go on to build a service that is influential and that a lot of people rely on, then you need to be mature, right? I think I’ve grown and learned a lot,” said Zuckerberg.
If the goal of Facebook’s security team was to keep a hacker from accessing the accounts of executives and therefore all of their messages, they could have merely been deleted on their side the way any Facebook user is free to do, without them disappearing from the various recipients’ inboxes. If Facebook believed it needed to remove the messages entirely from its servers in case the company’s backend systems we breached, a disclosure of some kind seems reasonable.
Now as Facebook encounters increased scrutiny regarding how it treats users’ data in the wake of the Cambridge Analytica scandal, the retractions could become a bigger issue. Zuckerberg is slated to speak in front of the U.S. Senate Judiciary and Commerce committees on April 10, as well as the House Energy and Commerce Committee on April 11. They could request more information about Facebook removing messages or other data from users’ accounts without their consent. While Facebook is trying to convey that it understands its responsibilities, the black mark left on public opinion by past behavior may prove permanent.
If you have more info on this situation, including evidence of messages from other Facebook executives disappearing, please contact this article’s author, Josh Constine, via open Twitter DMs, josh@techcrunch.com, or encrypted Signal chat at (585)750-5674.
For more on Facebook’s recent troubles, read our feature pieces:
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