#deletefacebook has been trending for a while now, unless you’ve been living under a rock there is a pretty good chance that you’ve come across delete facebook and the massive cry for online privacy.
So what’s all the fuss about?
It all began with a Cambridge professor, Dr Aleksandr Kogan who created an app for Facebook called thisisyourdigitallife similar to an MBTI style personality quiz, to the unassuming public it seemed to perform psychological research. Kogan paid about 270,000 people to fill out a survey built on Facebook’s developer tools — allowing him to pull information on “liked” pages, as well as look at the “friends” of users that opted into his app. Kind of shady right? Well it gets worse.
So the professor pulls the data from those users, but because many of them used very low security settings, he’s able to pull data from their friends, and their friends of friends. All in all, data from 50 million users is drawn and then handed over to Cambridge Analytica to build a model of voting behavior. They offer this model commercially to political candidates for money. This data was then purchased to aid President Trump’s successful 2016 bid for presidency.
Also read An interview with someone who worked at Cambridge Analytica, and was involved in the hacks:
Is it legal?
The legality of it is debatable. However, Facebook’s terms of service was not followed. The data harvesting was supposed to be for “academic purposes”, it was used for political purposes. Only 270,000 people consented but 50 Million people’s data was collected. It is also arguable that the 270,000 people who consented to the ‘quiz’ did not know what they were consenting too.
After all the data was collected and Facebook found out what had happened they demanded the data be deleted from Cambridge Analytica’s records. Cambridge Analytica told FB they had deleted the info when infact they had not.
Does Facebook sell my information?
Okay so has Zuck has been in crisis mode cause he didn’t want a new middle man?. Facebook’s entire business model is based on data mining for targeted advertising. Googling the above question will take you to a FAQ page on Facebook with the following response.
No, we don’t sell any of your information to anyone and we never will.
You have control over how your information is shared. To learn more about the controls you have, visit Facebook Privacy Basics.
Problem is no one believes Facebook. Going to the Facebook privacy settings page , the FB Apps platform terms and conditions will ask you if you want to allow third parties could look at your history. Who are these people? You have no idea. Okay Disable. Phew! Problem solved right? Now none of those pesky developers will get your data.
Wrong. It turned out that via the Apps platform, FB allowed harvesting of your friends’ info too. So if one of my 200 friends had enabled the Apps platform, then I did not in fact have a choice about how my information is shared. So no matter what your profile settings were there’s pretty high chance your data was breached regardless of your consent.
Okay so what do I do?
I don’t think the “complete” story is out yet, so people are trying to fill in the pieces.
Limiting your interaction on Social Media should be a given.
Never put anything in your profile you don’t want everyone else to see.
It doesn’t solve the long term problem though. Internet privacy and data security really needs to be strongly regulated. Consent to data use is important, and it’s very weakly protected online right now.
On one hand, this kind of exchange is how the Internet has has always worked. Your data isn’t worth much to you, but it sure is to Facebook. A lot of internet companies wouldn’t exist if you couldn’t pay them with your data, because you definitely won’t pay them with your money.
This works because you don’t actually know how valuable your data is, and can be easily taken advantage of. You have no room for negotiation, and no consumer protection framework even exists there, and that’s pretty scary. Even a basic framework to start laying some legal ground would be beneficial to consumers, even if it just forced Facebook and the other data giants to show their hands a little bit.
So should I delete my Facebook account?
Facebook is a software giant with a market cap of more than 300+Billion USD. They will act against this data breach and come to the bottom of this. In a recent Facebook post, Zuck stated that In 2014, to prevent abusive apps, Facebook changed the entire platform to dramatically limit the data, apps could access. Most importantly, apps like Kogan’s could no longer ask for data about a person’s friends unless their friends had also authorized the app. Facebook also required developers to get prior approval from before they could request any sensitive data from people. These actions would prevent any app like Kogan’s from being able to access so much data today.
But regardless of this scandal FB and giants like Google are a threat to your privacy online. Deleting your Facebook account will be your first step to internet privacy.
Even Brian Acton, the co-founder of WhatsApp has joined the movement. You can choose between deactivating your account or visiting this page to permanently delete your account. But It’s not an instantaneous process, there’s a two-week waiting period. There will be a further waiting period of 90 days before Facebook deletes all your data.
Since Facebook owns both Instagram and WhatsApp, cutting ties with the company would be quite a hassle for many.
Slowlearner 
Good one
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