A US-based analytics firm has been suspended by Facebook. This action was taken while Facebook was investigating concerns regarding the gathering and sharing of user data.
The company, Crimson Hexagon was based in Boston. It claimed that it offers “customer insights” and has contracts with government agencies all over the world.
Facebook wanted to look if some of these agreements were in violation of its policies on surveillance. The network was unable to collect any evidence of the data being obtained inappropriately.
Wall Street Journal claims that Crimson Hexagon had contracts to access user’s Facebook data for clients such as a Russian and multiple US government agencies.
Later in March 2017, Facebook prohibited user information being utilized for government investigation following pressure from civil liberties group apprehensive regarding the targeting of protestors and rebels.
As per its own website, Crimson Hexagon works with a data set that encompasses, more than one trillion social media posts taken from Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, and others. It claims of being able to examine more than 160m photographs posted online on daily basis.
In addition to the government work, Crimson Hexagon has had deals with commercial companies encompassing BBC, Samsung, and Adidas.
Now the policy confusion is that collecting and sharing data insights with businesses is against Facebook’s policies.
It is said that Crimson Hexagon fell out of Facebook’s rule because it used data to create tools for investigation. However, Facebook never clarified regarding this policy to the Crimson Hexagon.
At first, the CEO of the company did not say anything about the suspension. But, last Friday its Chief Technology Officer defended the company’s work without particularly mentioning Facebook’s investigation.
According to him, the company just gathers publicly available social media data that anyone can use. The real conversation is not about a specific social media analytics provider, in fact, it is about the broader role and consumption of online public data in the modern world.
