by Ruby Henley
Facebook will soon be letting you know what they did with your private data. The most shocking thing you will learn is that your private texts were traded on the platform’s Messenger feature. You will learn that contact information you thought was tucked away on your cell phone is now being stored in Facebook’s data. You will be shocked, and you might even leave Facebook, but you will never have your privacy back.
Facebook took advantage of our human desire to be connected to people and things we are naturally drawn to. I think it would be safe to say they have participated in a type of voyeurism. At least that is the way I see it – plain and simple.
To think that personal messages with your friends or lovers are stored and shared with others is sickening. Basically, Facebook is a type of “peeping tom.” However, it was very naïve of any Facebook user not to intuit this was occurring. Yet, honestly, I would never have thought my private messages were being shared – never – how naïve is that?
If you want to download your Facebook data, go to settings and select the option to download data. Your history will be archived in folders, and you may be surprised to see what is exactly in those folders. You have been analyzed by peering Facebook eyes, and you have been used!
When you view your tracking data, you will be amazed. You will not be able to delete it, and it is theirs forever. What is surprising to me is the number of people they have shared it with. I am really stunned at this point.
“The controversy has renewed questions about whether the world’s largest social media platform does enough to protect the sensitive information it collects from users on its platform.
The data Cambridge Analytica obtained was originally collected by University of Cambridge psychology professor Aleksandr Kogan.
He used an app, called “thisisyourdigitallife,” which offered a personality test. Facebook users who downloaded the app also gave it permission to collect data on their location, their friends and content they had “liked.” The data collection was all completely allowable under Facebook’s rules at the time. a
Facebook has said that Kogan violated its terms of service by passing the information on to Cambridge Analytica, a firm that was later hired to work on President Donald Trump’s campaign in 2016.
Facebook banned Kogan and Cambridge Analytica from its platform last month, just before The New York Times published an investigative piece detailing how the data traded hands.”
thinkprogress.org/why-theres-no-such-thing-as-a-private-facebook-chat-3d590b7705b3/
“People are making more intimate connections now than ever before just by chatting through a window on a screen,” Ramani Durvasula, PhD., a Los Angeles-based psychologist at California State University, Los Angeles told ThinkProgress.
Those private conversations are rife with details that may seem insignificant on the surface but provide valuable insight into a person: “What people share via a private chat and what they share in a status update are vastly different,” Durvasula said. That’s what makes personal conversations “the best place to get data because it’s uncensored.”
People are already generally uninhibited online, sharing everything from their emotional ups and downs, to live-tweeting childbirth. But what’s said one-on-one pulls back another layer, exposing what truly makes one tick — “The stressors people share, the intimacies, give insight to what people are most passionate about,” Durvasula said.
“Everything you say, every character typed is being watched.”
Private chats online also tell companies like Facebook how you use technology, what kinds of information you share on which platforms and with which audiences. “Some people use it much more for one-to-one communications than they would use the other parts of Facebook,” Augustin Chaintreau, assistant professor of computer science at Columbia University in New York, explains. For example, Facebook may be interested in seeing whether certain users prefer emailing or texting loved ones, and only use its Messenger app to keep up with more tangential relationships. Or the data could be used to tell whether someone was in distress or needed help, he added.”
“The news keeps getting worse for Facebook – A new report this week says that the social media company has been collecting phone call and text message logs from users, but the company insists that they only did it with the users’ permission. Ring of Fire’s Mike Papantonio and Farron Cousins discuss this.
The news keeps getting worse for Facebook. A new report this week says that the social media company has been collecting phone calls and text messages from users. But the company insists that they only did it with the user in mind. They only did with their permission and they were just trying to look out for the user. What this story … Every day this story … Zuckerburg looks like a more and more, like he’s at the center of this entire thing, doesn’t he?
And he really is. He absolutely is. He declined earlier this week to meet with UK lawmakers to discuss all of the wrongdoing that this company has done. And this particular story, this really crosses a line here. You know, at first it was, oh, data got accidentally leaked. Or we worked with a company that was using it for micro-targeting, which isn’t 100% illegal. But this one, scraping the phones.
Explain how scraping works. People hear that term but, you know … Okay, scraping. It’s a lot more nefarious than-That they’re in contact with.
Right.
Yeah.
So it starts grabbing your-
Geometric.
… contacts. It grabs your call logs. How long you were on the phone. It grabs your text messages. What you’re saying. And who you’re saying it to. Your private, personal data that they … People don’t even know.
Okay, but here’s the other thing that they’re looking at that’s even more chilling. Once they grab the data from that user, the Android data, whatever it may be that’s been downloaded there. The question then becomes once they have the contact for that third person, are they then able to get into that third person’s information and it just geometrically grow. That’s really where this problem may end up heading.
So what’s the quick answer here? I mean, you know, you’ve got the shares dropped 14% last year. He’s coming out with his great apology. Gee whiz. You know what it is. He’s trying to make it sound like, gee, I have a big company here. Okay, I have a big company. I can’t really keep up with what’s going on. That’s nonsense, isn’t it?
Oh, it absolutely is. You know, especially when we’re talking about this particular instance of the data scraping from all of these devices. They knew what they were doing. They built it into the system, into the apps, and when he comes out and says users gave us permission to do that. It’s not exactly truthful. Because, yes they gave permission for Facebook to access their phone for things like messenger to try to find other people you may know on Facebook. At no point in that contract that users, you know, you just click yes, I agree. I accept, move on. Did they say, “You can have access to my phone calls. You can have access to my text messages.”
Yeah, and what they’ve done is, you know, Facebook will partner with these app sites or in their own app with, for example in this particular story, Android users, to where once they download the app. Once it’s on that phone, that new little app starts taking every piece of data from every-My blog entry.
Exactly. So, no, they didn’t give permission expressly for this and Zuckerburg is sitting here trying to tell us, “Well, we had permission.” No, you didn’t. You had permission-
Well, what had-
… No you didn’t. You had permission to find a contact.
Yeah, okay, we’re talking about phone numbers, the length of the call. What was the communication, whatever. So then, now … Watch this. I call … They get your information from something I posted. Now, you have nothing to do it. You’re a third party out there. You have nothing to do with anything. What if, I’m just saying, what if we see now that you now become a target because of your association with me. You see that’s the real problem.
Well, here is another problem too. We already know with the Cambridge Anylitica thing that they were given the data to political campaigns.
Both sides, by the way.
Right, right. But this isn’t … That’s not the end of it. That is not the end of it at all. Why does a company like Facebook need your private data? Who all are they selling it too and that is what we need to find out now, because there is no way that this was just for a one time, one campaign thing. They have got to be selling this data.”