Indian government is looking into the resurgence of Facebook’s struggles with consent

• Facebook has allegedly been sharing user data with numerous device manufacturers.
• The Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology in India has stated that its looking into the reports to assess the gravity of the situation.
  
• Facebook, in its defense, has said that they only built device integrated APIs to make sure the product was accessible to everyone.

Cambridge Analytica can declare bankruptcy and Facebook can update its policies, but the Government of India is still on the back foot against the social media giant. The Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology is looking into reports of Facebook allegedly sharing data with at least 60 different device manufacturers.

The list includes household names like Apple, Samsung and Amazon. The ministry told the Indian Express that the analysis of those reports will help them gauge the gravity of the situation.

Facebook, in their defense, stated that those agreements were formulated when app stores and integration were still in their infancy. Due to those constraints, online platforms including Twitter, YouTube and Google, had to work directly with stakeholders to get their product into the market.

The issue, as was with the Cambridge Analytica scandal, is of informed or valid consent. The Sunday report by The New York Times implicated that Facebook, was again, sharing data with device makers without explicit permission. More than the ‘deep data share’, the issue is that the company declared that it would no longer do so after settling charges levied by Federal Trade Commission (FTC) in 2011.

Basically, what that means is, that despite users choosing not to share, some device makers could still retrieve their personal information.

What’s more worrying is that most of these partnerships with manufacturers are still in effect. That being said, Facebook did start wrapping them up in April after the onslaught on the Cambridge Analytica scandal.

Even Apple, a company that was using Facebook’s data sharing to its advantage until last year, chose to distance themselves even further from the social platform during the developer’s conference this week. During Monday’s keynote address, the company unveiled a new feature that would allow users to have greater control over what information seeps through to Facebook from their phones.