+
So, Cambridge Analytica is getting some well deserved criticism for
+(mis)using information it got from Facebook about 50 million people,
+mostly in the USA. What I find a bit surprising, is how little
+criticism Facebook is getting for handing the information over to
+Cambridge Analytica and others in the first place. And what about the
+people handing their private and personal information to Facebook?
+And last, but not least, what about the government offices who are
+handing information about the visitors of their web pages to Facebook?
+No-one who looked at the terms of use of Facebook should be surprised
+that information about peoples interests, political views, personal
+lifes and whereabouts would be sold by Facebook.
+
+
What I find to be the real scandal is the fact that Facebook is
+selling your personal information, not that one of the buyers used it
+in a way Facebook did not approve when exposed. It is well known that
+Facebook is selling out their users privacy, but a scandal
+nevertheless. Of course the information provided to them by Facebook
+would be misused by one of the parties given access to personal
+information about the millions of Facebook users. Collected
+information will be misused sooner or later. The only way to avoid
+such misuse, is to not collect the information in the first place. If
+you do not want Facebook to hand out information about yourself for
+the use and misuse of its customers, do not give Facebook the
+information.
+
+
Personally, I would recommend to completely remove your Facebook
+account, and take back some control of your personal information.
+According
+to The Guardian, it is a bit hard to find out how to request
+account removal (and not just 'disabling'). You need to
+visit
+a specific Facebook page and click on 'let us know' on that page
+to get to the
+real account deletion screen. Perhaps something to consider? I
+would not trust the information to really be deleted (who knows,
+perhaps NSA, GCHQ and FRA already got a copy), but it might reduce the
+exposure a bit.
+
+
If you want to learn more about the capabilities of Cambridge
+Analytica, I recommend to see the video recording of the one hour talk
+Paul-Olivier Dehaye gave to NUUG last april about
+
+Data collection, psychometric profiling and their impact on
+politics.
+
+
And if you want to communicate with your friends and loved ones,
+use some end-to-end encrypted method like
+Signal or
+Ring, and stop sharing your private
+messages with strangers like Facebook and Google.
+
+