One of the highest profile removals following the Cambridge Analytica revelations.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-43514648
And Facebook’s share value has taken a hit too.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-43517995
This comes in the wake of the UK’s information commissioner blocking Facebook from using WhatsApp user’s secondary data.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-43404071
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I really don't understand what all the fuss is about. Data collection and targeted propaganda has always existed, it's just more sophisticated using social media. Everyone on FB and other sites is aware that they are giving away their details. Just read this article which examines the consequences for advertising and propaganda in a changing world.
https://www.spectator.co.uk/2018/03/...nts-your-vote/
$1000 per user affected!Originally Posted by peterb
Why I don't let them on my phone:
https://arstechnica.com/information-...ndroid-phones/
Useful link in that article to how you can download your facebook archive. I'm grabbing mine now... be interesting to see how much/little they've got from me....
That would involve rebooting into Windows for me, I don't allow Facebook any toehold onto my Linux partition. Might reboot later for a blast in Elite so could have a look then, I will be interested to see how much they get from me when I am best described as a reluctant user.
I think the main issue is, yeah, as an individual you can choose how private you want to be with your own information to an extent.
When somebody uses an app or whatever that then exposes their contacts to then have their own data plundered that's a different matter entirely.
I don't consent to somebody I may know making decisions on how my data is used. But then I don't use FB.
I am hopeful this sheds more light on how companies use data in general so we can finally give consent or not rather than live in a grey nomansland.
Yeah data is collected and used but it shouldn't be free.
Grab that. Get that. Check it out. Bring that here. Grab anything useful. Take anything good.
I think the world has changed, once personal information was just that, and we prized that privacy. But the internet connectivity and social media involves a whole new mindset, namely the sharing of information and details.
I wonder if this isn't part of some sort of backlash against the popularity and power of FB and other social media. Many of these new tech companies are being challenged by traditional viewpoints and business models.
Also I think those in denial of democracy(ie: Brexit vote, and Trump election), are looking for anything to explain why their propaganda didn't work. Trump's election team in conjunction with FB correctly targeted those swing states. That's good political maneuvuring. And all political parties and movements use these techniques to target the right people with the right information, just the same as advertisers do.
That, for me, is the core issue.
Suppose a privacy-conscioys user, A, shares data they consider private, with ONE trusted other uset, B.
B, on the other hand, has their privacy settings set open.
These "scraping operations not only scrape B's data, but because A trusted B, now A's private data gets scraped.
Now suppose A is a friend on some bloke called, oh ... "Saracen" ..... seems like a good name.This bloke woukdn't be caught dead with a FB account, but unknown to him, his friend A has his contact details stored. And because of B, who Saracen has never heard of, those contact details have now been scraped, warehoused, sold, used and very pissibly abused.
And, of course, it isn't just FB at it. They just happen to have the spotlight on them.
Extend that data scraping to other tech companies, then extend it to hardware like phones, and as referenced earlier, Android phone data has bern scraped for years.
My personal view is that I dont want my personal data stored by, let alone used by, big-tech or big-data for ANY reason. I don't want ANY ad's, but if they have to be there, they should be non-targeted, and under NO CIRCUMSTANCES do I want to be micro-targeted. By ANYBODY.
So I'm not an FB user. I don't have a smartphone. My two Android devices have never had ANY personal data on them, by which I mean no names, details, phone or email, no photos, no banking details or credit card numbers, and not a single email has ever bern sent ir collected, except the one to unlock the device in the first place,musing a one-shot, disposable email address. And the first thjng I did on poweting up was macimise security settings, disable lication services, etc, and set up browsing via a VPN.
To any such companies that have data referring to me, I DO NOT want you using it, you DO NOT have my consent, implied or explicit, andcI DO NOT want your marketing or political messages, or indeed, use of your apps if data scraping is the price.
Can I keep my data private? Probably not. But I do not, and will not, EVER give my consent for it's use, and if that means not using FB, or even useful devices like smartphones, so be it.
And that, johnroe, is what the fuss is about. FB users might have realised, on some abstract level, that their data is "used", but the vast majority of non-tech-literate users have no idea of the depth or breadth or that usage, or the nature of what's being done with it.
Interesting though that may be, be aware it's the tip of the iceberg.
There are more layers. It's not just the raw dara that's dsngerous, but links and patterns that, given a big enough population of other data, can be drawn from it.
In other words, it's the processing, matching, analysing, it's the population groups you've been put in, the psychographics, the inferences drawn about you based on patterns in your data and that of millions of others.
All this latter stuff is where the danger lies, but it won't show in any description of your personal data because it wasn't collected about you, but inferred from your data, by the kind of "wizardry" firms like CA do.
Well of course personally I agree(although I admit my mindset is pre-FB,etc). I am also as careful as I can be with my information in the real world and online, no FB. I was shocked the other day when I switched off all my ad blockers, I'd never seen so many ads. Have VPN set up, etc.
But I think the younger generation have a different mindset(post FB), and I see all this data collection and analysis as an inevitable consequence of social media. I saw an article the other day, the thirty things FB knows about you. These 'analytical' companies reckon they can psychologically profile everyone. That has greater implications for all of us(imagine being profiled before a job application or getting a mortgage), rather than targeted propaganda. I'm sure I read that FB bought all Experian's data. So I suppose data is being traded. Is that illegal, I'm not sure.
I'm sure many younger people have a very different mindset. In part, that may be that youth implies a lack of experience in where it might lead, with impact on job applications being one. Most bigger (and many smaller) firms have been reviewing applicant's social media accounts for years .... sometimes with markedly ... ummmm ... 'adverse' impact. The applicant may never find out why they're having trouble.
Another impact, at least in countries with no 'free at point of delivery' NHS, is the ability to even get health insurance. Or even in the UK, for those with private cover, the premiums.
Now extrapolate from companies examing hard data to being influenced by 'analytics', and you get a new level of scary.
However .... there's no doubt that social media companies do offer significant and genuine benefits, too. Younger people are more likely to be switched on to, and enjoy, those too.
Personally, I'm not anti-social media companies out of principle or dogma. But I am against them for me because the price, in loss of privacy is too high. But to judge that the benefits justify that price is also a perfectly valid personal decision.
What I do think we need a regulated and legislated environment for, however, is that each and every one of us should have to give a genuine, informed and explicit consent, based on transparency as to what is done with our data. In an ideal world, that permission would be granular enough to be able, for instance, to give permission for marketing and adverts, but deny permission for political use, or to grant a company, say Amazon, to use data internally, because you trust them and use them, but deny then the ability to give, sell, trade or otherwise diseminate your data to ANYONE else without your specific, explicit permission.
Me? I'd deny any and all such permissions. The upside is my data stays much more private, but the downside is I might lose out on offers, discounts, promotions, new product launches, etc. But that's MY choice.
In other words, return ownership of our data to US, the individuals, and WE can choose to participate or not. And if we do, to what extent, and with US getting at least the benefit of some of the value of that data.
Maybe there's a market for social media companies offering people like me a subscription option (not that I would take it) as an alternative to using data. Or maybe not, and either you surrender data or don't use the service.
Either way, it ought to require transparency about what's done with personal data, and a genuine, explicit, revokable informed consent to do it. If people still allow it, then fair enough, it's their choice. Mine will be not to, across the board.
when someone agrees to complete an App profiling them... fair enough... let it rain on them.
but if the App in question steals as much data about their Facebook contacts as possible.. the reach is astounding.
no one here think I like FB. Some of you know I struggle with it... it's like deliberately putting yourself into The Trueman Show every day.
I do love their daughter company, Instagram...and as Elon says, as long as it stay's relatively seperate, I'm happy to use it (seperate log in to FB which I use for work)..but the moment it's hinted at compromise.. off it goes too. I am curently served with good clever marketing adverts, and I'm ok with that. It's like having a newsletter from Amazon or Ebay with stuff I might like. It's part of the territory.
And,.. I like well aimed adverts.
Example - I was offered a very good discount on a Chainsaw deal that I had no idea about... I wasn't looking for one but it was good enough to be worth knowing about. Win
Win ... for you. That's why we should all have a personal choice.
For me, I'd rather have zero adverts and, when I want a chainsaw (or whatever I was looking to buy) to look around, probably in my local hardware store, and buy it locally. If the advertising I was bbeing sent offered me a FREE chainsaw, I'd still rather get no advertising and just buy it. So what was the chainsaw? £500? £1000? Neither of those come anywhere close, in orders of magnitude, to what would be necessary to get me to willingly agree to personalised adverts. If it was a brsnd new car, maybe. I have my eye on AMG Mercedes. If someone can find a company offering me one of those free, I'll maybe rethink my stance.
Seriously though, there is no realistic prospect of ANYTHING an actual company might offer coming close to my 'price' for allowing my data to be used.
So here's the thing. With some, at least, of these social media 'platforms', when someons joined, maybe 10 years ago, they ticked a box giving some permissions. Say, to upload your phone numbers for contacts from your phone. Years later, I give that person my phone number, snd they stick it in their phone's contact list, very possibly with not just name, but maybe home address, work number, work title, employer, etc.
So now that platform has all that data about the user, but ME TOO. And when exactly did they get permission from me to acquire, store, process, use or sell such data?
One of the exceptions to having to comply with Data Protection Act data subject access requests is when releasing data about the subject making the request would also release personal infirmation about a 3rd party. Yet, social media platforms do it all the time, not only without thinking, but because it is explicitly designed in to their core business model.
I think the above AMG made my stance clear. I DO NOT want these companies storing, let alone using, data about me. Period. By inference, that also means I don't want ANYBODY storing data about me in any form accessible to these scumbag platforms, so if anyone is, please delete it immediately.
For me, the very worst thing about FB, any others, is not that they hoover up data you've given permission for, but that they hoover up 3rd party data without any consideration of 3rd party consent, on the apparent assumption that their user can grant such consent for the 3rd party, without the 3rd party even knowing.
Got an app that "syncs" between devices and/or platforms? Now go read the T&Cs about data permissions, but not just what they explicitly say, but at what the legalese can be construed to justify if, or when, their lawyers want to make it cover that. The danger is nearly always in the vague-sounding "other uses" bit tacked on the end as if it were an afterthought, when in fact it's the primary, critical bit.
The ONLY way, IMHO, to stand even a chance of keeping SOME data private is to be almost paranoid in avoiding putting anything onto public networks unless you utterly can't avoid it. Which is why I buy shopping for cash (not debit/credit card), never use store 'reward' cards or disciunt code sites, don't own a smartphone and partly why I rejected Win10 as an option. It's also why I spend less and less time online, and why the vast majority of my computing usage is offline and air-gapped. These firms are so all-pervasive, and invasive, that minimising their reach necessitates fairly drastic steps.
I wonder what general FB users think. I think at one time all our 'data' was internalised, but post FB, etc, it has become externalised. Many people expose their whole lives online, like a confessional. They upload every moment. People who have held secrets for years(say about abuse) are revealing all online. Once people expressed themselves about say politics in the local pub, but now it's globally expressed. I think there is becoming a time with; social media, smartphones, the 'internet of everything', where if you don't exist as a digital entity with a continual data stream, then you don't exist!
I still think this is being driven by those in denial of democracy, and popularised by the media(who are losing advertising money, and becoming irrelevant in terms of spreading their propaganda wholesale to the populace).
Again the Luddites are driven by fear. The mainstream media fears social media. The banking institutions fear the cryptocurrencies. Political institutions fear the shifting of power as tech companies detach themselves from national laws and taxes. The world is changing quickly, and I wonder if young users of FB and other social medias, would liken our privacy concerns to the paranoia displayed by Harry Caul.
I'm only guessing but it's probably a 50/50 split, or there abouts, with half being rather taken aback to discover how much data FB hold about them and the other half not caring or being unaware of how powerful knowing things about people can be.
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