1 + 2. Proper functioning of a policing system in response to real allegations

The first two hypotheses are straightforward; maybe it’s true but they don’t have enough evidence for an arrest yet; and all this is unconnected to his threat to release yet more sensitive documents. Maybe it’s untrue, and like some ‘crimes’ reported to the police, that reports turn out to be too shaky.

3. PR test balloon for upcoming smear campaign

Or it really is a smear campaign against Julien Assange. Sex sells. This might at the very least be a ‘test balloon’ by some PR-savvy anti-Assange outfit (the CIA?), wanting to see how the press might respond to a full-on smear campaign. But if this was a wikileaks taskforce’s test balloon, wouldn’t they have done it in a normal newsday?

4. Vaccination by an attenuated pathogen

Assange is pretty damn good at PR himself. What if he’d decided that his best strategy in anticipation of a smear campaign was to vaccinate the media and their readers to smear, and prevent the next allegation from going viral?

Here’s how a smear vaccine might work: find two acolytes to report the alleged rape and molestation on just barely credible terms, and then either have them withdraw them or bring to light certain facts that mean that the charges HAVE to be dropped (factual inconsistencies, for example, or a previous record of crying wolf; etc).

Do this quickly on a Saturday morning when newsrooms are too understaffed to do much reporting and will probably not have much time between the issuing of the charges and the withdrawal to actually spread the uncorrected, damaging rumours; just the retraction.

Result? CNN runs a front page headline next to not-negative press about you (charges withdrawn) suggesting to all its viewers that you might well be the target of a smear campaign. Future journalists AND readers will be immunised and healthily sceptical the next time something like this is comes up.

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2. Virgin Media anti-piracy: who’s the crook now, eh?!

I suppose my first point is how ‘the American Dream’ is repeatedly referred to by those involved, throughout the programme. Several of them went from ‘rags to riches’, so arguably it fits them.

But the product they’re now forcefully selling to prospective students is an American dream perversity: the message is firstly, whatever your personal characteristics, American prosperity and success will be denied to you unless you have accreditation from an institution that itself has accreditation (irrespective of its own characteristics). Secondly, you have to pay for this accreditation. You will not break through in society unless you pay up. Society’s “answer” has been to fuel the accreditation system with a subprime loan system that is easy to get into (no credit checks, no certainty that the applicant is going to be able to find gainful employment even with this new degree under their belt), but hard to escape from once you’re in, no matter how bad things get for you.

The issue for me is not really the profiteering. The practice here is no more abusive than other industries based on deceptive marketing over objective contribution to reputation (which traditional universities rely on, pouring money into research programmes, etc) that are undergoing huge, unsustainable growth (a bubble) based on overflowing and poorly thought-through Wall Street capital on one side (as in the mortgages market) to meet demand unlocked by idealistic but cretinous state-provided finance.

The issue for me is that the whole demand for education – which underpins the aforementioned perverse industry – is a nonsense. Education is wrapped up, institutionalised and commoditised, viewed as a universal ideal in the ‘product’ form it is offered, and extremely divisive between the underclass that has not purchased the product and those that have. It’s yet another barrier to entry, to social mobility, to liberty to explore ways to contribute to society in exchange for payment. It’s self-perpetuating, since the pressure to push more people through education means that the more apt/determined of students have to find new ways of distinguishing themselves – hence you see the sinister (but perhaps unintentional) sense in BPP up-selling the LLB after contributing to diluting the value of the GDL.

The best treatment of the topic I have come across is the short but ever so sensible and powerful Deschooling Society by Ivan Illich. I warmly recommend it to any that have ever thought about how to go about creating an open, accessible and liberal societies. How please he would have been with efforts like Wikipedia and other open learning, open access, “open society” movements.

Lastly, quite what role universities play in the future, sandwiched between the Internet on one side and privatised, commoditised education on the other, remains to be seen.

Related posts:

1. Education, Unltd: Part 1
2. Education, Unltd: Part 2

The acquisition as 4/5th funded by Apollo, whilst the Carlyle Group (well known to Michael Moore and his unwashed ilk for its huge presence in the US war machine and its ties to both the Bush and Bin Laden families and the UK Conservative party) stumped up $200m for the ongoing joint venture.

Since then, BPP has been aggressively expanding, and I have been part of that effort: as a Brand Manager, I’ve assisted on open days, fairs and even a marketing video. The UK Bar Standards Body, the non-governmental body which regulates education to become a UK barrister (read: attorney) had their guts for garters over a disgraceful ‘administrative error’ that led to massive oversubscription on the course, swelling class sizes and seeing people turned away at short notice before the start date of the course they’d previously been accepted to.

BPP is adding centres around the country, and increasingly shifting to online, long-distance courses. Leverage. It’s also running a very strong upselling campaign to get people in my position to ‘upgrade’ our GDL into LLB (i.e. Bachelor of Law) degrees – getting the accreditation to do so was one of the very first moves it made after Apollo took the reins.

And in very recent news, BPP also announced that it is abandoning its bases as a professional educational college, and taking the title ‘University’ – the first private university in thirty years, and fully in keeping with Apollo’s US track record.

Yet it’s worth pointing out that the tutoring and teaching I got last year was mostly really very good. I was lucky to be in a class of very bright people and mostly quite good tutors. So my concerns aren’t derived from personal experience; they came from an HR person I got talking to that was attending a BPP event I was working at. She was from a very decent City law firm.

BPP, she said, has become less selective in who it allows onto the course. People with 2:2 (i.e. third-rate) degrees from universities are now given places when before a 2:1 or better was required. Her complaint is that this has made her job harder; no longer a badge worth trusting, she has to look deeper into CVs to see if they have to be binned at first sweep through the thousands of applications they receive. Worse, the HR personnel now have to field calls from emotional mothers asking why their child is being turned down for City jobs despite the family having shelled out/indebted itself in order to pay for the most expensive GDL course on the UK market. In truth, a third-rate university degree is going to be a straight-up rejection and the HR personnel view BPP’s new practice as at best immoral, at worst, downright deceptive.

So that’s my connection. I realise that sharing it in this tripartite piece is labelling myself a profiteering hypocrite whilst simultaneously shooting myself in the foot by potentially devaluing the value of a keystone of my CV; and may perhaps come to be seen as a snobbish and irrational act from an Oxford graduate irritated at seeing the value of his further education cheapened as his degree is made more accessible to ‘the high street’. Even if this comes to be seen as a good thing, it’s an enduring truth that good things are not necessarily good ideas.

Related posts:

1. Education, Unltd: Part 1
2. Education, Unltd: Part 4 – closing thoughts

Prospective students are enticed into the promise of a better future by college recruiters and pushed into courses which their previous educational background makes them unsuited for (they can’t cope, and future recruiters bin their CV – and this is something I have personally heard happens in the UK – again, see Part 3).

The message (forcefully delivered) is: you’re investing in your future, and somebody else is providing the money up front.

It’s a hugely leveraged system that’s state-subsidised because it’s thought to provide a public-private hybrid solution to bring social mobility to poor Americans at little to no up-front cost to them. Sound familiar? It’s the same logic that saw US banking regulators giving the thumbs up for zero downpayment mortgages to subprime borrowers; duping the subprime into taking easy credit to fund a sure-thing investment in real estate, giving Americans the independence of home ownership and the net worth to get them out of poverty. Wonderful ideals based on cretinry. Because the value of houses would obviously keep going up, this cheap capital would drag millions out of poverty. And obviously, the value of education will keep going up, too.

And the courses, sometimes, really are appalling. In the most tragicomic section of the PBS Frontline documentary this blog post is about, 40 minutes in, three women are sat around a table, recounting the practical experience they got on their degree in vocational nursing.

“They took us to the Museum of Scientology for our psychiatry module” “For the pediatrics rotation, we got taken to a daycare”.

When the hospitals inevitably ask them about that experience, they have to admit: these qualified vocational nurses have never set foot in a hospital.

Related posts:

1. Education, Unltd: Part 1
2. Education, Unltd: Part 4 – closing thoughts

It then delivers a fairly devastating exposé of the booming for-profit model in higher ed, which is worth discussing in depth. This is part 1 of 3; I’ll save my personal interest in the issue for last.

It’s crucial to understand what the for profit model offers. It operates in the following way: “underperforming” (for which read: financially troubled, not: delivering crap education) US schools/colleges are bought, and the ‘Three M’ are brought in: Money, Management and Marketing. Tenured professors are thrown out, class sizes boosted, and a big emphasis is placed on online courses, which scale incredibly well – they’re convenient to the thousands of students that can now follow a class, and incredibly capital-efficient for the investors. The keyword is leverage.

Intermediaries broker these investment opportunities, linking rich investors to the underperforming colleges. The Frontline documentary focuses on a broker named Michael Clifford (here’s his company’s website, ignore the sinister background music and videos of people without eyes reading cringeworthy scripts; and here’s his page on it – he is titled the ‘Man To See’), who is a ‘passionate believer in education’ though he himself doesn’t have any higher education (as you could guess from his LinkedIn profile (live at time of writing), which describes him as an ‘Education entreprenaur’ [sic]) – this even though he does have a ‘Dr’ title before his name, two honorific degrees from institutions he has turned around. Clifford was flung out from the overheating West Coast music biz, and became a born again Jack Welsh-worshipping entrepreneur.

The financing for these deals is mostly unexceptional Wall Street stuff. As I’ll discuss later, we even see the notorious Carlyle Group (a Michael Moore favourite) getting involved.

The financing occasionally gets a little more kooky than that, all involved parties tending to be quite  agnostic as to where the money comes from. The documentary gets an inside peek into the purchase of a failing college by the Dream Centre.

The Dream Centre is an arm of a Los Angeles megachurch complete with neon-backlit, full-production stage with synth-driven electro-pop bands with toyboy haircuts, even its own music label. It’s housed in an old hospital providing both religion and rehab to LA’s myriad ex-convicts, prostitutes and drug addicts. It forms part of the wider International Church of the Foursquare Gospel, which apparently has 8,000,000 members and 60,000 churches worldwide. The Dream Centre was looking to purchase the college so as to provide educational courses to both its rehab-ees, and the social workers, and gain more presence out in the community served by the college. The deal on the table was ‘keep it nonprofit (i.e. tax efficient) unless we can’t find enough financial backing in which case we let outside for-profit investors in’.

The Dream Centre was interested in this college, in particular, because it had Regional Accreditation. Everything turns on that status, and it alone is estimated as being worth $10,000,000 to a deal. In reality, to investors, it’s worth a lot more. Why?

Well one aspect is evident: marketing. To be Regionally Accredited is to have something in common with Harvard and the rest of the Ivy League schools.

But it also means that people enrolling to the school can get federal student loans. Big, easy loans that are largely blind to your credit history or even to whether you’re suitable to the education that the loan is about to fund. The loans are real bastards once it comes to paying the back though – NOTHING, not even bankruptcy, will wipe them out, you’ll be dragged in front of courts, interest is considerable, and you’re banned from taking a job funded with public money.

But they put paid-for bums on seats; the fall-out post-graduation is the graduate and government’s mess to sort out, not the businesses’. It’s a fantastic scam on the public purse and the private individuals involved; according to PBS:

Though they enroll 10 percent of all post-secondary students, for-profit schools receive almost a quarter of federal financial aid. But Department of Education figures for 2009 show that 44 percent of the students who defaulted within three years of graduation were from for-profit schools

(I’ll cut off here and deal with other subjects – like quality of education, future prospects, and close with personal comments and an explanation of my connection to this story – in later posts)

Related posts:

1. Education, Unltd: Part 2
2. Education, Unltd: Part 4 – closing thoughts

The case was part of the ongoing Bratz versus Barbie legal saga – where Mattel is trying to effectively take control of the Bratz dolls empire, developed in a rogue Mattel employee’s spare time. Mattel got first blood in a very significant 2008 victory. To quote the judge (p7): “In effect, Barbie captured the Bratz”.

At the heart of the issue was the rogue’s contract, in which he agreed to Mattel owning all his ‘inventions’ developed at any time during his employment with Mattel. The term

‘includes, but is not limited to, all discoveries, improvements, processes, developments, designs, know-how, data computer programs and formulae, whether patentable or unpatentable’

– and the lower court concluded that this included his ideas for Bratz dolls. Ideas are commercial property, even if not copyrightable, patentable or otherwise protectable.

Justice Kozinski held that the wording didn’t include ideas. The legal reasoning he uses to fall the other side of what is a rather fine line, playing on ambiguity and opting for narrow interpretation, is not wholly convincing (even if tenable), and arguably speaks more to his general views – see p9 of the judgement. But it’s sensible and equitable adjudication. But it isn’t crucial, because he then turns his guns on the remedy imposed by the lower court even if he were wrong.

He later undoes the work of previous courts that concluded that “at any time during his employment” included evenings, weekends and time off, deciding that it was so ambiguous, it should go to a jury, not be decided by judges.

To impose a constructive trust on the Bratz trademark portfolio (effectively, to say that Mattel’s ownership effectively reaches through the entirety of all parties’ efforts, investment and inventiveness in developing the Bratz brand) is grossly inequitable. It’s not wrong for the property subject constructive trusts to be handed back to the victor plus what rise in value has occurred naturally – you prevent a fraudster/thief from getting unjustly enriched using an asset that’s yours. But the line should be drawn, says Kozinski, at value added to the constructive trust assets by the hard labour of the loser. You avoid taking the defendant’s clothes along with the pound of flesh.

Further, after displaying an admirable if slightly bizarre familiarity with dolls and cartoon characters* (covering Japanese anime to Betty Boop), and discussing the utility of dolls clothes (“Dolls don’t feel cold or worry about modesty. The fashions they wear have no utilitarian function”) he finds that Mattel is only entitled to a limited standard of protection, that of virtual identity, since there is a limited range of expression of the idea:

‘Mattel [is not] entitled to broad protection because there are many ways one can depict an exaggerated human figure. It’s true that there’s a broad range of expression for bodies with exaggerated features: One could make a fashion doll with a large nose instead of a small one, or a potbelly instead of a narrow waist. But there’s not a big market for fashion dolls that look like Patty and Selma Bouvier. Little girls buy fashion dolls with idealized proportions—which means slightly larger heads, eyes and lips; slightly smaller noses and waists; and slightly longer limbs than those that appear routinely in nature. But these features can be exaggerated only so much: Make the head too large or the waist too small and the doll becomes freakish, not idealized.’

And so to the third and final, and possibly most instructive, part of the judgement, addressing the question are the Bratz dolls substantially similar to the mock-up dolls which the rogue made during his Mattel employment? If yes, the after-hours mock-ups (which would hypothetically be owned by Mattel) would have been copyrighted works infringed by the dolls. Kozinski says: no. The reason, he explains, is that an idea (for bratty dolls) is not copyrightable. Only the unique expression of the bratty doll concept is copyrightable. Once you strip away all obviously un-copyrightable features: nose, hair, eyes, etc, the sole remaining ground for the lower court’s finding of copyright infringement withers under Kozinski’s gaze – because of the idea/expression dichotomy so crucial to copyright law:

Mattel can’t claim a monopoly over fashion dolls with a bratty look or attitude, or dolls sporting trendy clothing—these are all unprotectable ideas.

Nice to know that a pernicious and bratty lawsuit over pernicious and bratty dolls can have intelligent, informative high brow dividends. It’s a victory for common sense and good, equitable justice, founded on a solid grasp of IP law and policy; the title of this piece is taken verbatim from the final words of the judgement.

*From a judge who got into hot water for ‘hacking’ into the judicial IT system to disable the ‘anti-porn’ web filter!

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1. It’s happened

But commercial sport’s casts more shadows on the law than that. Let’s not forget the orange ladies that dared to wear minidresses. Part of a commercial conspiracy by Bavaria Beer to get ‘free’ advertising on the back of the World Cup, they faced charges  of "unauthorised commercial activities inside an exclusion zone" and "enter[ing] into a designated area while in unauthorised possession of a commercial object".

Under diplomatic pressure from the Dutch government, the charges were dropped. Yet somewhat incredibly, the UK government has also seen fit to make commercial use of certain words (like “Gold” or “2012”) a criminal offence once the Games roll into town – I shit you not).

Here’s a quick lesson in how commercial interests get to set criminal law in this country:

Corporations, if they really suffered damages, could potentially sue. But then, the poor sponsors are faced with the hassle of going after minidress wearers, in tort law, or the people the sponsors bought their ad exclusivity from (in London 2012’s case, the IOC and LOCOG), in contract law.

So the sponsors have a good ol’ moan (in SA, to FIFA; for the Games, to Seb Coe); these then bring their weight to bear on our governments, who then crack the whip over their legislature in order to pass draconian criminal laws.

How nice: I’ll have to remember that next time I go into commerce, I should just get the state to make some special criminal laws making it a special criminal offence for people to tread on my special business toes. Much better than having to get my own lawyers involved to sort out my own commercial problems – I can just send the cops in. And who knows; maybe we should even do what the South Africans do: fast-track it through a special system of steroid-addled courts, at huge financial outlay.

Even the Chinese government didn’t think it appropriate to go down this route for Beijing 2008. But clearly, the West is unwavering in its commitment to democracy and the rule of law and gets to repeatedly poke the Chinks in the eye with how bloomin awesome our constitutions are. Especially during their Olympics.

One can only hope they think to return the favour.

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And what they saw, for a country trying to ‘rebrand’ itself, was troubling. Anxious to ensure that crime didn’t spoil the marketing and festive spirit, a system of hardcore ‘FIFA courts’ was setup to deal with ‘World Cup-related crime’ in the rainbow nation, rapidly doling out harsh punishments for a wide variety of crimes. These ran the gamut from pissing off the sponsors, to mugging the tourists, even being used to seemingly ‘get one back’ at foreign journalists whose pen was not unquestioningly friendly to all that was going on.

Giving the SA justice system a booster shot is not, invariably,  a Very Bad Thing. But this is arbitrarily streaming  certain types of justice over others, to protect and further a political and economic motive. That goes against basic principles of the rule of law and the separation of powers.

Nor is it seemingly fair on the few fools who committed World Cup-related crime, given how tough the sentences are and how ridiculously expedient the sentencing was. It’s Judge Dredd-ish, and politically motivated. One would have thought that a country with South Africa’s history would have been reluctant to return to a system of inequality before justice…

Case(s) in point:

- a 15 year sentence to hard time for the robbers of two Portuguese journalists. Time from arrest to sentencing took just 48 hours.

- a full 3 year sentence for a Nigerian convicted of handling 30 stolen tickets in Pretoria: arrest to sentencing in 24 hours

- a full 2 year sentence for a 21 year old that pilfered a German tourist’s picnic blanket, 3 beers and guidebook; arrest to sentence in less than 24 hours

- a full 3 year sentence, delivered in just 20 minutes’ court time, to a 22 year old Jo’burg youth South African unarmed youth with no criminal priors that nicked an Argentine’s mobile

This in a country with 400,000 thefts each year…

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1. Rule of law, Rule of sponsors
2. What was Swedish arrest warrant anomaly surrounding Assange about?

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2. Beijing/Shanghai

TO: Data Controller / Legal Compliance

Facebook Ireland Ltd

Hanover Reach

5-7 Hanover Quay

Dublin 2

IRELAND

RE: Subject Access Request (Data Protection Acts)

Dear Facebook (Ireland),

I wish to make a subject access request under s4 of the Data Protection Acts 1988 and 2003 (Ireland), the Data Protection Act 1998 (UK) and all other applicable legislation reflecting the rights I am conferred as an EU citizen under EU Directive 95/46/EC.

If you are not the designated Data Controller for Facebook, please pass this to the appropriate person, bearing in mind the legal deadline. I am expecting the company’s full and frank compliance with applicable Irish and EU law and thus expect to be given this data within the stipulated 21 days. Facebook was first given notice of this request in writing (via several channels on your online communication system on the Facebook website) on 10^th May 2010.

As my (EU-based) contracting party, I am by law entitled to receive a copy of any information you keep about me, on computer or in manual form, and any information about me passed outside the EU.

I would like a full and frank disclosure of all information held. Please inform me of all information you are legally bound to withhold. Please note that I will not be satisfied by any attempted exemption of information allowing the identification of third parties where those parties are known to me (i.e. form part of the same Facebook ‘Networks’ as me).

I prefer to be sent this information digitally wherever possible, in as full a depth and breadth as possible, and additionally in such structured formats as it is accessed, processed and/or communicated by your company.

I understand that you might like me to prove my identity, so a copy of my UK passport is attached. That is to be the sole lawful purpose for that document’s use. I understand that my rights also extend to demanding the removal of information about me when it is not held for the lawful and clearly stated purpose, and thus am giving advance notice of my exercise of that right: please release and delete that document once it is no longer required to prove my identity.

Yours faithfully,

Philippe Bradley

Also included was a photocopy of my passport and my contact details, plus a link to my facebook profile.

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2. An apology – Facebook frienders

• - your conscious self, actively filling in your profile
• - your less conscious self, passively interacting with the site, browsing certain pages, ‘Liking’ pages around the Web (or not clicking the Like button and still telling Facebook what pages you’re on)
• - your social network, interacting with you – indeed, your social graph can be highly predictive of who you are.

But what constitutes ‘my information’ for the purposes of a Subject Access Request (SAR) under UK, Irish (indeed, Europe-wide) Data Protection legislation?

A subject access request is an order any person in the EU can send any EU-based business that collects their data. It’s an order along the lines of ‘show me what you got’.

So I sent one. Initially, and with infinitesimally little hope of a reply, through some of the Contact Us webforms on facebook.com – doubtless to join mountains of rubbish in there, despite being clearly marked ‘Legal request: please respond; subject access request under the Data Protection Acts’.

And yet I knew that an earlier brave soul had managed to use a different part of the Data Protection Act to get Facebook to properly delete his account (Facebook prefers you to ‘deactivate’ accounts so you don’t leave an information black hole in the picture they’ve built up of everyone around you.

This told me two things. One, that for some reason Facebook thought it was under DPA jurisdiction. Two, it considers your social graph to be very important data – data about you, but with wider implications than that. So it was worth pushing on.

Thanks to a good spot by eagle-eyed lawyer Andrew Sharpe (@TMT_lawyer on Twitter if you want to follow his developing thoughts on the implications of his find; and here’s me), the secret is out: unless you’re accessing Facebook from the USA, in which case you’re contracting with a business in California, under Californian law, if you’re dialling in from anywhere else you’re dealing with a business in… Ireland!

All hands to the typewriter, I boshed out a pitiful attempt at a serious sounding Subject Access Request Letter (which I will post later)(Edit: HERE) and dispatched it, airmail to be signed for on delivery, with haste.

I suppose technically Facebook’s 40 days for compliance started when I sent them my first SAR (through their website forms). That was 16 days ago. Whether I want to argue that or not probably depends how nasty I’m feeling 24 days from now. Facebook’s been under the privacy kosh recently and maybe they deserve the extra 16 days if we mutually were to consider my posted letter to be the first SAR.

Let’s see what happens now. I would love suggestions in the comments concerning what data I should insist upon receiving, and in what format.

I will also be posting a rough guide to use of European data protection legislation in the coming weeks. In the meantime, wherever you are, you can have a look at the EU pages on the subject.

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FOIA is pretty wonderful. It gives you a (qualified) right to drop an email to any public authority, being as snippy as you like (in fact, terseness and clarity are very much encouraged) and they have to bend over backwards (up to 18 man hours’ worth) to get you an answer.

The problem is that ‘public authority’ is defined even more narrowly in FOIA than it is for other ‘good government’ citizens’ tools, like the Human Rights Act (which gives you rights against interference by public authorities) or judicial review (whereby any unfair or improper decision taken by a public authority can be put through the courts which can order that it should be ‘done right’, and fairly). In FOIA, public authorities are either the ones listed in Schedule 1 to the Act, or designated as such by the Secretary of State (i.e. by the government). The buck, seemingly, stops there. You can’t get anywhere with a FOIA request to any government contractors, like many care homes for example, or ex-national utilities, now privatised (e.g. Network Rail, BT, etc), or bodies charged with ‘self regulating’ and industry.

Or can’t you. This post is effectively a bleg: I would love to know from someone with experience with FOIA, whether the following hypothesis has any legal merit. I wonder whether you could probably construe s3(2)(b) as catching any information gathered (and thus now held) under delegated powers. It reads:

s3: Public authorities

(1)In this Act “public authority” means—

   (a)subject to section 4(4), any body which, any other person who, or the holder of any office which—

      (i)is listed in Schedule 1, or

      (ii)is designated by order under section 5, or

   (b)a publicly-owned company as defined by section 6.

(2)For the purposes of this Act, information is held by a public authority if—

   (a)it is held by the authority, otherwise than on behalf of another person, or

   (b)it is held by another person on behalf of the authority.

I would love to be able to slap a FOIA on government contractors or pseudo-governmental regulatory bodies. How good would it be to FOIA the Press Complaints Commission for emails, reports, the lot… we could disinfect the single biggest influence in modern British politics and society, the popular press!

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2. The Facebook Data Protection Act letter