More and more Americans are joining the chorus that Facebook’s hoarding of data about its users, which has fueled its phenomenal growth, is not a good thing for us individually or as a nation. And it’s music to my ears.
My loathing of that pillager of cherished American values posing as a social media company has been often stated in this space. It has dumbed down and antagonized our conversations about important issues, robbed legitimate news outlets of advertising dollars while contributing no real reporting, wasted countless hours of employee productivity and led to increased narcissism and harassment, among so many other societal ills.
And more specifically, it allowed a hostile foreign nation, Russia, an opportunity to try and sway who holds our most important elected office. Then news came out that Facebook allowed other companies who make apps unfettered access to users’ personal information. Can you imagine anything more useful to a hacker trying to steal your identity than knowing everything you posted on Facebook?
CEO Mark Zuckerberg finally acknowledged there might be a problem, taking out a full-page ad in several national newspapers to apologize and promise to do better. But as Twitter user Adam Quinton noted, “The ‘amusing’ thing is he talks about the ‘community’ as if @facebook was a book group or a church. But it is a half-a-trillion dollar advertising colossus where the users are the product sold to those advertisers.”
Amen, brother.
That hits the point exactly: Facebook cannot truly change its ways of mining user data to target ads because its wealth is based on that premise. The stockholders would not respond kindly if it quit now. All this concern from Zuckerberg is not a real intent to change, but just chagrin that everyone finally figured out what the company has been up to for the past decade.
This discussion all leads me to this question: With so much attention focused on Facebook’s selling of personal information to advertisers, do you know what it has on you?
There’s an easy way to find out:
1. Login and click on the little triangle at the top right of the page, then “Settings.”
2. Under “General Account Settings,” choose “Download a copy of your Facebook data.”
3. On the next screen, click the green button “Download Archive.”
4. You’ll get an e-mail when the archive is ready and can then download it to your computer.
I encourage you to give it a try, and I think you’ll be shocked about how much is saved. Essentially everything you’ve ever done on Facebook is there from the time you joined (1:16 p.m. on Wednesday, Dec. 14, 2005, for me) to a list of advertisers with your contact info (who knew “Viking River Cruises” knew about me?). There’s a list of every ad you’ve clicked and targeted ads topics it thinks will interest you — mine includes as diverse a list as Domino’s Pizza, children’s author Sandra Boynton, “satire” (in general, I guess) and yoga; hmm, I never even knew some of that about myself!). It lists every time you’ve logged in and what device you used, every message, every friend, every post, every photo, every video. It’s all there, an unprecedented amount of information — for sale to the highest bidder.
Of course, the argument could be made that I willingly posted it, but that was because Facebook sold itself as a way to keep up with friends and family, without mentioning its nefarious plans to enrich itself by selling that data. Also, giving that private information to another company wasn’t what I bargained for when I posted about my love for pizza, satire or anything else.
After looking at all your information, you may come to the same conclusion as an increasing number of people: The only way to keep your identity safe is to delete your account.
Charlie Smith is editor and publisher of the Columbian-Progress.
