Facebook is creating records — but who is managing them?

Abstract

Facebook is creating records from the data that users are pouring into their profiles. This paper examines Facebook's data practices in the context of record creation through the theoretical lens of the Records Continuum Model. Three stakeholder groups are identified in record creation: the users, the site, and third-party platform participants. This paper analyses Facebook's data sharing practices in conjunction with the Cambridge Analytica scandal, and the new General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR).

Social media data archives in an API-driven world

“…Digital preservation techniques, policy, social, and technical constraints have always been shaped by our ability to access information and bring it into custody, for example with proprietary formats or unique playback hardware (e.g., Faniel and Yakel 2011;Hedstrom and Lampe 2001;Rimkus et al 2014). The current API access regime of platforms that depend on large collections of aggregated user data for access and reuse of these collections is not typically managed or oriented toward archival principles (Glassman 2019). Few preservation perspectives or non-commercial use cases have been subsumed into the development of platforms as part of their market strategies as for-profit corporations (Conway 2010;John and Nissenbaum 2019).…”

Enabling privacy-preserving SNS communications by design

“…Also, the users' responsibility to actively protect their personal data by configuring embedded settings -they usually neglect them (Madejskiy et al, 2011)-and by employing additional Privacy Enhancing technologies (PETs) wherever necessary, should be emphasized, as the measures taken by the SNS platform solely are not sufficient in achieving desirable protection, e.g. when there is need to protect users' data from the platform (Kayes and Iamnitchi, 2017) and third-parties offering applications (Glassman, 2020).…”