Facebook information scandal: How are users in Vietnam affected?

According to expert Vo Do Thang, for many years now, Facebook has allowed application developers on the Facebook platform to collect information and user data. And not only Facebook but also other social networks or platforms on the Internet, because Facebook has the largest number of users (more than 2.1 billion users), so when an incident occurs, it causes more shock.

Application developers on the Facebook platform are allowed to use tools and connect data with Facebook users, thereby being able to exploit their friend lists and related information. For small applications, the collected data can be analyzed for internal use or business operations of the enterprise. However, for large applications, raw data will be sent to server systems for analysis, separation, classification, etc. to be used for each specific goal, at least to buy targeted advertising.

Mr. Ngo Tuan Anh - Vice President in charge of Cyber ​​Security of Bkav - said that today, the analysis of data of millions, tens of millions of users has been applied with big data technology with the support of artificial intelligence (AI) to deeply analyze the habits, interests, behaviors... of each class of users, thereby bringing advertising information to the right audience or potential customers.

It is worth remembering that the Thisisyourdigitallife app that caused the data leak scandal initially only conducted a survey with 270,000 users, but through that it gradually spread to the friend lists of Facebook users, eventually collecting data from 50 million Facebook users.

According to Mr. Ngo Tuan Anh, currently, if any, applications that collect data on Facebook in Vietnam also follow a similar mechanism. However, this expert observed that currently, the collection of user data in Vietnam is mainly limited to the purpose of using it for business and commerce.

Expert Vo Do Thang stated that if the information collected is used for the business’s own work, most commonly for business development, then it is acceptable. However, if the information is sold to a third party for many different purposes, causing inconvenience or harming the rights or personal freedom of users, then it must be considered a violation.

As in the Facebook incident that is causing a stir, the information of 50 million Facebook users was used for political campaigns, and could even be used to spread fake news, which would cause many other consequences for individuals and society.

Another aspect that Mr. Vo Do Thang noted is that the laxity of application developers in collecting user information on Facebook using scanning tools makes it easy for them to exploit information for unfair competition. For example, through collecting information on competitors' Fanpages to find out their communication and marketing strategies; find out their customer base along with their consumer behaviors and preferences to compete against them.