blog/data/2018-03-21-cambridge-analytica-facebook.txt

   1 Title: Facebooks ability to sell your personal information is the real Cambridge Analytica scandal
   2 Tags: english, personvern
   3 Date: 2018-03-21 16:30
   4
   5 <p>So, Cambridge Analytica is getting some well deserved criticism for
   6 (mis)using information it got from Facebook about 50 million people,
   7 mostly in the USA.  What I find a bit surprising, is how little
   8 criticism Facebook is getting for handing the information over to
   9 Cambridge Analytica and others in the first place.  And what about the
  10 people handing their private and personal information to Facebook?
  11 And last, but not least, what about the government offices who are
  12 handing information about the visitors of their web pages to Facebook?
  13 No-one who looked at the terms of use of Facebook should be surprised
  14 that information about peoples interests, political views, personal
  15 lifes and whereabouts would be sold by Facebook.</p>
  16
  17 <p>What I find to be the real scandal is the fact that Facebook is
  18 selling your personal information, not that one of the buyers used it
  19 in a way Facebook did not approve when exposed.  It is well known that
  20 Facebook is selling out their users privacy, but a scandal
  21 nevertheless.  Of course the information provided to them by Facebook
  22 would be misused by one of the parties given access to personal
  23 information about the millions of Facebook users.  Collected
  24 information will be misused sooner or later.  The only way to avoid
  25 such misuse, is to not collect the information in the first place.  If
  26 you do not want Facebook to hand out information about yourself for
  27 the use and misuse of its customers, do not give Facebook the
  28 information.</p>
  29
  30 <p>Personally, I would recommend to completely remove your Facebook
  31 account, and take back some control of your personal information.
  32 <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2018/mar/19/how-to-protect-your-facebook-privacy-or-delete-yourself-completely">According
  33 to The Guardian</a>, it is a bit hard to find out how to request
  34 account removal (and not just 'disabling').  You need to
  35 <a href="https://www.facebook.com/help/224562897555674?helpref=faq_content">visit
  36 a specific Facebook page</a> and click on 'let us know' on that page
  37 to get to <a href="https://www.facebook.com/help/delete_account">the
  38 real account deletion screen</a>.  Perhaps something to consider?  I
  39 would not trust the information to really be deleted (who knows,
  40 perhaps NSA, GCHQ and FRA already got a copy), but it might reduce the
  41 exposure a bit.</p>
  42
  43 <p>If you want to learn more about the capabilities of Cambridge
  44 Analytica, I recommend to see the video recording of the one hour talk
  45 Paul-Olivier Dehaye gave to <a href="">NUUG</a> last april about
  46 <a href="https://www.nuug.no/aktiviteter/20170404-big-data-psychometric/">
  47 Data collection, psychometric profiling and their impact on
  48 politics</a>.</p>
  49
  50 <p>And if you want to communicate with your friends and loved ones,
  51 use some end-to-end encrypted method like
  52 <a href="https://www.signal.org/">Signal</a> or
  53 <a href="https://ring.cx/">Ring</a>, and stop sharing your private
  54 messages with strangers like Facebook and Google.</p>