Facebook: is it time we all deleted our accounts? by Arwa Mahdawi from The Guardian
Facebook: is it time we all deleted our accounts?
The Cambridge Analytica revelations may be the final nudge we need to
turn away from the social network. And it’s only the tip of the iceberg
when it comes to big tech harvesting private information
Facebook has displayed a remarkable lack of contrition in the immediate aftermath of the Cambridge Analytica revelations.
Photograph: Piotr Malczyk/Alamy Stock PhotoSorry
to break it to you, but you are probably a “dumb fuck”. This is
according to statements by a young Mark Zuckerberg anyway. Back in 2004,
when a 19-year-old Zuckerberg had just started building Facebook, he
sent his Harvard friends a series of instant messages
in which he marvelled at the fact that 4,000 people had volunteered
their personal information to his nascent social network. “People just
submitted it ... I don’t know why ... They ‘trust me’ ... dumb fucks.”
Fourteen years later, the number of people who have trusted
Zuckerberg with their data has grown from 4,000 to 2 billion. Zuckerberg
has also grown, or so he would have you believe. In a 2010 interview with the New Yorker,
the Facebook founder said he regretted those early messages. “If you’re
going to go on to build a service that is influential and that a lot of
people rely on, then you need to be mature, right? I think I’ve grown
and learned a lot.”
When it comes to respecting and safeguarding the information people
have given him, however, has Zuckerberg really learned that much? Recent
events suggest not.
On Saturday, the Observer revealed how Cambridge Analytica,
a company funded by conservative billionaire Robert Mercer, acquired
and exploited the data associated with 50m Facebook profiles. It appears
that while Facebook had been aware of what the Observer described as
“unprecedented data harvesting” for two years, it did not notify the
affected users.
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What is the Cambridge Analytica scandal? - video explainer
What’s more, Facebook has displayed a remarkable lack of contrition
in the immediate aftermath of the Observer’s revelations. Instead of
accepting responsibility, its top executives argued on Twitter that the
social network had done nothing wrong. “This was unequivocally not a
data breach,” Facebook vice-president Andrew Bosworth tweeted
on Saturday. “People chose to share their data with third party apps
and if those third party apps did not follow the data agreements with
us/users it is a violation. No systems were infiltrated, no passwords or
information were stolen or hacked.”
In a sense, Facebook’s defence to the Cambridge Analytica story was more damning than the story itself. Tracy Chou,
a software engineer who has interned at Facebook and worked at a number
of prominent Silicon Valley companies, agrees that there wasn’t a hack
or breach of Facebook’s security. Rather, she explains, “this is the way
that Facebook works”. The company’s business model is to collect, share
and exploit as much user data as possible; all without informed
consent. Cambridge Analytica may have violated Facebook’s terms of
service, but Facebook had no safeguards in place to stop them.
While some Facebook executives were busy defending their honour on Twitter over the weekend, it should be noted that Zuckerberg remained deafeningly silent.
On Monday, Facebook’s shares dropped almost 7%, taking $36bn (£25.7bn)
off the company’s valuation. Still, Zuckerberg remained silent. If
you’re going to build a service that is influential and that a lot of
people rely on, then you need to be mature, right? Apparently, silence
is Zuck’s way of being mature.
But forget how the folks at Facebook are reacting to this – still unfolding – PR crisis.
If you’re one of the social network’s 2 billion users, how are you
reacting? Have you deleted your account in protest? Are you angrily
sharing articles about the fiasco on Facebook but continuing to use the
service? Have you shrugged and moved on?
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For my part, the Cambridge Analytica
story was the nudge I needed to finally cut ties with the social
network. I’ve been trying to extricate myself from Facebook for a long
time. My uneasiness with the network largely stems from the fact that I
used to work in advertising and, for years, was on the receiving end of
many a sales pitch from Facebook, Google and other companies that have
built businesses trading in users’ data.
Funnily enough, the likes of Facebook deliver a very different
narrative to marketers than they do the wider public. They downplay
their significance when challenged by the media about, for example,
their influence on the 2016 US election. They downplay their power to
deal with online harassment or the spread of fake news. However, if
you’ve got an advertising budget and want to know how Facebook can
persuade your target consumer to buy your product, it’s a different
story. Suddenly, Facebook is an all-knowing entity with unrivalled
information; it can get almost anyone to do almost anything. While Facebook
presents itself to the public as a social network, when addressing the
advertising industry, it is very clear about the fact that it’s a
surveillance system.
Learning just how much Facebook knew about its users put me
off using the network. But while I stopped actively using Facebook and
its suite of apps, including Messenger and Instagram, years ago, it’s
only recently that I decided to delete my account. Before taking the
plunge, however, I downloaded an archive of all the data
I had put on Facebook. There’s an option to do this when you go to
Facebook’s settings. It’s easy and I highly recommend it. Seeing years’
worth of data neatly arranged serves as an important wakeup call as to
the extent of the information you have handed over to the company. Even
then I was loath to get rid of my account altogether; just in case I
needed to contact someone or check something. But on Monday, having
witnessed Facebook’s refusal to take any meaningful responsibility in
regards to the Cambridge Analytica story, I deleted my account in
disgust.
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To
be clear: I’m not recommending that you do the same. In many ways,
being able to distance yourself from Facebook these days is a privilege.
As Safiya Noble, an assistant professor of information studies at the
University of Southern California and the author of Algorithms of Oppression,
notes: “For many people, Facebook is an important gateway to the
internet. In fact, it is the only version of the internet that some
know, and it plays a central role in communicating, creating community
and participating in society online.”
Even if you’ve got multiple ways to communicate and participate in
society online, there is not really a good replacement for Facebook.
There’s no one portal that reminds you of your friends’ birthdays,
connects you to relatives across the world and stores photos from 10
years ago. Deleting Facebook inevitably means missing out on certain
things and having to make more of an effort to connect with people in
other ways.
What’s more, unless you delete Facebook’s entire ecosystem of apps,
including Instagram and WhatsApp, you aren’t safeguarding yourself from
the company’s data-collection practices. I haven’t brought myself to
delete WhatsApp, for example, because I still think that the benefits of
using that outweigh the privacy tradeoffs. Nor have I fully deleted
Instagram, which is just as nefarious as Facebook. Deleting my Facebook
account may have some way to protecting my sanity, but it has done
little to minimise my digital footprint.
As Noble stresses, “deleting individual Facebook accounts will not
solve the total datafication of our lives”. While deleting your account
may give you some temporary satisfaction, it has “little impact on
finding real solutions to the way data is being collected, sold, and
used against the public. This issue isn’t just about one platform like
Facebook, and the issues of surveillance and experimentation on the
public, it’s about the many companies that are tracking and profiling
us, and the abuses of power that come from having vast troves of
information about us, available for exploitation.”
Other data experts echo Noble’s view. As Frederike Kaltheuner, who leads the data exploitation programme at the charity Privacy
International, explains: “You can delete your Facebook, but you will
still be tracked in your online and increasingly also your offline life.
Mobile phones are by definition a tracking device.”
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The
recent revelations about Cambridge Analytica are just the tip of the
iceberg when it comes to how our data is being used and abused. This can
not be stressed enough. The internet is increasingly a worldwide web of
corporate surveillance and it’s impossible to piece together a complete
picture of how your personal information – both your online and offline
data – is being utilised. While behemoths such as Facebook are
guaranteed to make headlines, there’s a lot less media scrutiny of the
thousands of other companies that make a living out of extracting and
exploiting your personal life in extremely dubious ways.
The software company Pixoneye,
for example, is far from a household name. But if you have granted an
app permission to access your photos in the past, there’s a good chance
you have allowed it to utilise Pixoneye’s tech. This scans the photos on
your phone and uses the data it extracts to create a story of who you are.
It might characterise you as someone who watches sports, for example,
or as wine-drinker who enjoys lots of family holidays. Your photo
gallery offers a staggering amount of insight: as the CEO of Pixoneye wrote in an op-ed last year:
“Our smartphone image galleries have in many ways become a reflection
of our lives … each image you have stored contains a range of data
attributes and meta tags that not only reveal your past purchasing
profile, but can also be the key to predicting what purchases you’re
likely to make in the future.”
So, you might be thinking, an app knows I like wine, and uses that
information to sell me stuff. What’s the big deal? In isolation, not
much. But, as Kaltheuner stresses, “when combined, data can reveal a
lot”. Bringing together multiple data sources is “how data-brokers have
information such as personality profiles and relationship statuses”. The
more data points you have, the more you can predict. As the Cambridge Analytica investigation revealed,
even a few dozen Facebook “likes” can strongly predict someone’s sexual
orientation, or the political party they are most likely to vote for.
If you’re starting to feel jittery about the exploitation of your
personal data but aren’t ready to delete social media and go and live
off the grid, there are some simple steps you can take to mitigate your
digital footprint. “We should all do a little digital spring cleaning,”
advises Leila Hassan, head of analytics at the London branch of Ogilvy, a
global advertising agency. “Check what [third-party apps] you’ve
enabled through your social channels. I’ll bet most of us still have
things enabled from years ago.”
In order to examine the apps you have enabled through Facebook, go to
settings and click “Apps” on the left sidebar. When I did that I was
somewhat alarmed to find that I had given 68 apps indefinite access to
my Facebook data. Even more alarmingly, accounts I had deleted ages ago –
such as the dating app Bumble – still seemed to have access to my
Facebook information.
Once on this page, it’s easy to revoke permission for particular apps
to access your data. It’s much harder, however, to view or remove the
data they have already collected. Facebook informs you that you should
“contact the developer of the app” if you want to get rid of the data
they have collected. I didn’t really feel like contacting the developer
of 68 different apps before deleting my Facebook account so I am unclear
about the fate of the data they have amassed. Presumably it’s all
floating around in the cloud somewhere.
What else can you do to try and minimise your digital data trail? Jim Killock, from Open Rights Group,
an organisation that works to protect the right to privacy online,
suggests “posting less, sharing less and, most importantly, removing
page ‘likes’ as these are a major way [Facebook tries] to profile you”.
Killock further suggests using “privacy plug-ins to block Facebook
cookies, and cookies from other websites, which they all use to keep a
record of the sites you visit, and making extra, ‘fake’ accounts”. But
Killock stresses that while it’s important that people are more
cognisant of their online behaviour, “regulators must also act”. So must
companies. “At Privacy International, we want companies to do better
and protect privacy by default, rather than users having to become
full-time data protection experts in order to have their basic rights
protected,” says Kaltheuner.
The good news is that regulators are slowing starting to act. On 25 May, the EU General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) is going to come into effect. This is an important step in shifting the balance of power, when it comes to data, away from companies and back towards individuals.
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Kaltheuner
notes that a key point of the new legislation is that it is
extraterritorial. “This means that if you are a company based outside
the EU (for example in the US), and are offering goods or services to,
or monitoring the behaviour of individuals in the EU, you must comply
with it. This is especially important in countries, such as the US, with
no comprehensive data protection regime.”
While the GDPR is an important step towards giving people control
over their data, it’s far from a cure-all. It is no exaggeration to say
we are teetering on the edge of a data dystopia. Just look at China,
where the government recently announced
that it will ban people with poor “social credit” from travelling on
planes and trains. And it’s not just China where oblique algorithms are
determining the direction of our lives. The recent revelations about
Cambridge Analytica are an important wakeup call that we are all living
with the sociopolitical consequences of surveillance capitalism. We
can’t just sit back and hope that regulation will save us. We can’t just
click and like and share as usual and hope something will eventually
change. We are, I think, at a critical moment where the degree of
corporate surveillance to which we are all subjected can either get much
better, or much worse. So, I would urge you to extricate yourself from
social media as much as you can. Deleting your Facebook account may not
put an end to the surveillance state, but it sends an important message
to big tech that we don’t trust them any longer.
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