Shadow profiles are the biggest flaw in Facebook’s privacy defense


Called before Congress this week, Mark Zuckerberg tried to present Facebook’s approach to user data as open and transparent. In question after question, he focused on the privacy choices available to users, and their ownership over all the data they share — and it wasn’t all wrong. Facebook has data because users share it (mostly). Users control that data and can review it or delete it whenever they want (with a few exceptions). And if you delete your account, (almost) all of that data will disappear from Facebook’s servers within 90 days. None of it’s false, but as the parentheses should tell you, it is incomplete — and by the second day of hearings, members of Congress were starting to catch on.

The most powerful example came from Rep....

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