I Hate Facebook
Facebook is Dangerous to our Democracy
I assume everyone is aware of the Facebook scandal in which FB allowed a political consulting group to access 50 million accounts, which were then used to assist the Trump political campaign to win the Presidency. The amount of information that FB has on customers is shocking and I AM CLOSING MY ACCOUNT in protest.
Here is the scary info: Facebook makes it hard for users to delete their accounts, instead pushing them towards “deactivation”, which leaves all personal data on the company’s servers. When users ask to permanently delete their accounts, the company suggests: “You may want to download a copy of your info from Facebook.” It is this data dump that reveals the extent of Facebook’s data harvesting – surprising even for a company known to gather huge quantities of personal information.
One user, Dylan McKay, reported that for the period October 2016 to July 2017 his logs contained “the metadata of every cellular call I’ve ever made, including time and duration” and “metadata about every text message I’ve ever received or sent”.
Many other users reported unease at the data they had discovered being logged, including the contacts in their address books, their calendars, and their friends’ birthdays.
I assume everyone is aware of the Facebook scandal in which FB allowed a political consulting group to access 50 million accounts, which were then used to assist the Trump political campaign to win the Presidency. The amount of information that FB has on customers is shocking and I AM CLOSING MY ACCOUNT in protest.
Here is the scary info: Facebook makes it hard for users to delete their accounts, instead pushing them towards “deactivation”, which leaves all personal data on the company’s servers. When users ask to permanently delete their accounts, the company suggests: “You may want to download a copy of your info from Facebook.” It is this data dump that reveals the extent of Facebook’s data harvesting – surprising even for a company known to gather huge quantities of personal information.
One user, Dylan McKay, reported that for the period October 2016 to July 2017 his logs contained “the metadata of every cellular call I’ve ever made, including time and duration” and “metadata about every text message I’ve ever received or sent”.
Many other users reported unease at the data they had discovered being logged, including the contacts in their address books, their calendars, and their friends’ birthdays.
