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Facebook Looks to Limit User Backlash Over Privacy Concerns with Civil Liberties Initiative

Hoping to stem the tide of public scrutiny and financial fallout after a series of damaging privacy scandals, Facebook has announced that it will partner with a number of civil liberties organizations in hopes of pushing for government reform. According to a report from VICE News, the New York Civil Liberties Union (NYCLU) and the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) have put their support behind Mark Zuckerberg and his social media behemoth, propping up the tech giant’s latest attempt to limit government overreach. At the very least, Facebook and its partners want the Stored Communications Act of 1986 — a law which gives law enforcement the power to seize any stored data without notifying its owners, so long as they have a warrant — either modified to fall in line with the realities of 2014 or thrown out altogether.


NSA of Greatest Concern, but Facebook is Its Own Worst Enemy
Facebook and the many SEO services that rely on the social media platform to generate buzz and money for their clients have experienced a hard time since revelations from whistle blower Edward Snowden revealed that the National Security Agency has been using Facebook, both through legal and illegal means, to spy on American citizens.


Many SEO company services are left wondering how much more Facebook’s public image can take before users flee from the service in droves. A May 2014 article from The New York Times details a number of operations undertaken by the NSA to use the platform as a mass surveillance portal. The agency used profile pictures to try and find suspected terrorists and tricked many users into giving away their account information through facades made to look like the typical log-in screen.


Consumers, search engine optimization services, and industry analysts were concerned with just how easily the NSA broke into Facebook to implement these methods of attack, prompting Mother Jones and others to wonder whether or not Facebook was colluding with the government.


Zuckerberg and the gang haven’t helped their public image by performing social experiments on unwitting users. According to the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, Facebook filtered out certain types of posts for different users, hoping to see if social media could manipulate users’ emotions. A report on the success of the study didn’t sit well with many of the company’s 1.4 billion active users.

Scott Charters:
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