People Are Horrified After Downloading Their Facebook Data: They Keep Texts, Phone Calls & More…

Arjun Walia from Collective Evolution March 28, 2018

 

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Many people seem to be having issues in regards to their privacy on social media. It’s no secret that today privacy doesn’t really exist, and intelligence agencies along with communications corporations

have been collecting data on the global population through various means, one of them probably being Facebook. This type of data collecting and surveillance is justified by stating that it preserves national security, among other things.

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As Edward Snowden (NSA whistle-blower) recently tweeted:

“Facebook makes their money by exploiting and selling intimate details about the private lives of millions, far beyond the scant details you voluntarily post. They are not victims, they are accomplices…Businesses that make money by collecting and selling detailed records of private lives were once plainly described as “surveillance companies.” Their rebranding as “social media” is the most successful deception since the Department of War became the Department of Defense.”

That being said, it’s not like this was secret information. It’s similar to the Snowden leaks, not many people out there were labelling mass surveillance as a ‘conspiracy theory,’ there was already enough information and evidence out there to make an educated guess about it.

Recently, people have been horrified after downloading their data and info from Facebook. We’re talking about millions of people, who probably don’t really pay attention to this type of thing like we in the alternative community do. This is why there is so much shock going around right now.

They have recorded conversations, kept text messages, and much more, and at the same time they’ve been selling this data to multiple companies, and perhaps even collecting and storing it for intelligence agencies.

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There are a lot more of these tweets.

This all started when it was recently revealed that UK data analytics corporation, Cambridge Analytics, gained access of personal information of more than 50 million Facebook users in 2014, largely without their consent.

“Cambridge Analytica, a data analytics company, got access to more than 50 million Facebook users’ data in 2014. The data was overwhelmingly collected, shared, and stored without user consent. The scale of this violation of user privacy reflects how Facebook’s terms of service and API were structured at the time. Make no mistake: this was not a data breach. This was exactly how Facebook’s infrastructure was designed to work.” (source)

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Prior to leaving in 2011, Chamath Palihapitiya, the vice-president for user growth at Facebook the company, said, “The short-term, dopamine-driven feedback loops that we created are destroying how society works. . . . No civil discourse, no cooperation, misinformation, mistruth.”

You can read more about that here.

So not only are we being watched, we’re also being manipulated in a sense.

Your own data can be requested as a zip file here.

So, How Can You Protect Yourself?

Thanks to the Electronic Frontier Foundation for the information.

Log into Facebook and visit the App Settings page (or go there manually via the Settings Menu > Apps ).

From there, click the “Edit” button under “Apps, Websites and Plugins.” Click “Disable Platform.”

If you don’t want to disable the platform, click “Edit” under “Apps Others Use.” Then uncheck the types of information that you don’t want others’ apps to be able to access.

Concluding Comments

Based on my research into surveillance done by governments and intelligence agencies, the reasons for invading our privacy never really seem to make sense. As mentioned above, with multiple examples, some of the reasons might even be completely fabricated. So, I encourage others to ask themselves, why? Why all of this data collection? Has Facebook, like most other high profiting corporations, simply collected data so they can sell it to other companies for huge amounts of money? Has the government intervened and used Facebook as another data collection method for their own purposes? Do they want to keep tabs on somebody that threatens the global elite’s plans in any sort of way? Or is it simply, again, all about money and finding out what we are all individually interested in?

We could go on and on and speculate, but the bottom line is, it’s not a nice feeling to know that everything you say and do is recorded and stored somewhere in a massive data base. It’s not ethical, it infringes on multiple human rights, and it seems to be completely unnecessary and a tool used by the global elite for their own selfish purposes.

One thing is for certain, the world is changing, and we’re starting to finally acknowledge what’s going on behind the scenes instead of branding facts as ‘conspiracy’ theories simply because they go against our own belief systems.

Ultimately, we are the users of these platforms, and they are detrimental in several ways as they are helpful and positive. It’s up to you to make the decision whether you want to continue to use them.