close
INDIAN (T)

Indian developers fear tighter controls after Facebook breach

no thumb


Indian developers fear tighter controls after Facebook breach Facebook will become less attractive to app developers if it tightens norms for data usage as a fallout of the prevailing controversy over alleged misuse of personal information mined from its platform, say industry members.

“There will be more scrutiny now. When you do, say, a sign on. The basic data (you can get) is the user’s name and email address, even which will undergo tremendous scrutiny before they approve it. That will have an impact on the timeline,” said a developer with an analytics firm that uses data from Facebook for its customers.

“(The viral effect) could definitely decrease. Now, without explicit rights from users, you cannot reach out to his/her contacts,” the person said.

India has the second largest developer base for Facebook, a community that builds apps and games on the platform and engage its users. With 241 million users, the country last July over took the US as the largest userbase for the social network platform.

Security experts are of the view that Facebook might take a leaf from Apple’s model while giving data access to third party developers.

“Apple constantly warns its users about the data being used. This means, if you give permission for an application to use your data once .. Next time when the developer wants to take more data from you, Apple warns you and asks for your consent again. This does not happen in Facebook now,” said Rahul Sasi, chief technology officer of CloudSek, a cloud security firm.”Apart from videos and posts, applications and games are what makes facebook entertaining. App developers help build Facebook’s audience, so there wouldn’t be any major restrictions for long.”

Read: Facebook took years to clamp down on developers’ data harvesting: ex-operations manager

Last week, Facebook banned data analytics company Cambridge Analytica from buying ads from its platform. The voter profiling firm allegedly procured 50 million physiological profiles of people from an application developer Aleksandr Kogan, who broke Facebook’s data policies by sharing data from his personality-prediction app, that mined information from the social network’s users.

Kogan’s app, ‘thisisyourdigitallife’ harvested data not only from the individuals participating in the game, but also from everyone on their friend list. Since Facebook’s terms of services weren’t so clear back in 2014 the app allowed Kogan to share the data with third parties like Cambridge Analytica.

“When developers create apps that ask for certain information from people, we conduct a review to identify policy violations and to assess whether the app has a legitimate use for the data. We actually reject a significant number of apps through this process. It’s important to note that Kogan’s app would not have access to detailed friends’ data today,” said Justin Osofsky, VP of Global Operations, Facebook in a statement.

“Three years ago – after Kogan first created his app – we changed the product so that developers can’t access the information of people’s friends” Osofsky said.

Experts believe that any privacy policy needs to take into account all third parties who get access to the data too.

“While designing a privacy policy one needs to keep the entire ecosystem in mind. For instance, a telecom player or a bank while designing their privacy policy will have to take into account third parties like courier agencies, teleworking agencies, and call centers who have access to all their data and what kind of access they have,” said Jaspreet Singh, Cyber Security Partner at EY.

“Third party companies developing applications should submit security report every quarter and even random random audits could be conducted,” he added.

Others view the current Facebook imbroglio as important learnings as India draws up a data protection policy, which is due this year.

“You will need to have a comprehensive statute, a data protection regulator, and also sector specific regulators who will come out with binding rules that account for large amount of social effects resulting from technology.,” said Apar Gupta, Partner, Advani and Co and a legal expert who is fighting for data protection laws in the country.



Source link

The author

Leave a Response