Facebook escalates war on accountability

Privacywashing vs Ad Observer.

Cory Doctorow

--

The Facebook ‘1 Hacker Way’ sign, before it sit the Three Wise Monkeys (hear no evil, see no evil, speak no evil), their faces replaced with that of Mark Zuckerberg. Image: Japanexperterna.se (modified) https://www.flickr.com/photos/japanexperterna/15251188384/ Minette Lontsie (modified) https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Facebook_Headquarters.jpg CC BY-SA: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0/ Anthony Quintano (modified) https://www.flickr.com/photos/quintanomedia/41793468502

Facebook just escalated its war on NYU’s Ad Observer project, a project that monitors and discloses Facebook’s failure to live up to its promise to block paid disinformation.

Here’s how that works. Facebook users volunteer to download and install Ad Observer, a browser plugin. This plugin scrapes the ads Facebook…

--

--