Baby pictures, check-ins on vacation, your new job — they all look like innocuous posts to mark simple steps. But your personal life is business in Facebook. These data, taken together, build a powerful (and profitable) profile who you are and what you value.
This is perhaps one of the most important lessons in Cambridge analyst scandal and the revelation that the firm can collect data from the 87 million users of Facebook. But Cambridge Analytics is not the only company that had access to vast amounts of personal information of users.
“Of course there are thousands, if not millions of applications that have similar access and collect such information, and many still do that, albeit under different terms,” Ian bogost, Professor at Georgia Institute of technology and a contributing editor to the Atlantic, told VOX.
Changes to this privacy policy Facebook made to its platform in 2015, made it harder for third party groups to obtain user information, according to Siva Vaidhyanathan, Director of the Center for media and citizenship at the University of Virginia. And as a result, the Cambridge analytic revelations, Facebook has announced more changes designed to protect privacy.
However, these changes do not completely remove your personal data from third parties. And if You don’t check your privacy settings regularly or read the terms of use of the application that you use on the platform, all this can seem overwhelming.
Before you resign yourself to the idea you sold your soul to Facebook for the right to publish wedding photos, here’s what the experts are saying that this means if a third party obtains your information, why it happened, and that, anyway, can be done about it.
1) What does it mean to “third parties” to access my Facebook data?
This means that you, as a user of Facebook, gave an external object — typically, the Developer who made the game or quiz personality, or some other application used on Facebook is the ability to use your Facebook profile and get all the information out there.
It is not a breach or hack: you probably gave the developer or manufacturer of the quiz authorization; you just probably just didn’t realize it.
“In each case, when you want to use a new application, there’s usually a pop-up window that says ‘click here to agree to our terms and conditions to play the game, or click here to take part in a quiz about your psychological profile, Andrea Matwyshyn, Professor of law and computer science at northeastern University, told VOX. “And by clicking “Yes” you take an affirmative act. By the way, that pop-UPS are usually created, they say, ‘here, you agree to our terms of use.’ So a simple click is regarded legally as an act of consent to all that was not in those terms, which may or may not read.”
It is often difficult to know what powers you give, and to whom, because the details are buried in an overly long terms of service policy written in legal and technical jargon.
And, says Bogost, for the average user Facebook, it often was not absolutely clear that a third party was involved in everything. “People don’t realize that they are leaving Facebook because they don’t leave Facebook,” said he. “They were happy, comfortably ensconced in his web site.”
2) But I don’t pass the tests. Farmville trend completely passed me by. I’m probably okay, right?
Do not have. Until may 2015, when Facebook changed its API (application programming interface) policy that gives a third party the right to obtain your data means it can also collect data of your friends. That is what was so insidious. If this random guy you’re friends with freshman year of College or two jobs ago, played a lot of games on Facebook, may inadvertently transmit information to his friends — including yours.
This is as about 87 million people may have had their data scraped Cambridge analyst. This is not what millions of people took that quiz; it’s that once you start to expand social network — friends, friends of friends — it starts to add up. “A treasure trove of information,” Bogost called it.
In 2015, Facebook converted that third-party developers can access. These changes in its policy, which was announced in 2014 and came into force in 2015, limited amount of relevant information that can be transferred to third-party developers, especially when it came to the attention of the friends.
3) what these third parties do with my data?
Answer: it depends on who gets it. Political Platform Facebook prohibits app developers from sharing or selling data. If a developer violates the rules, then Facebook will suspend the developer and conduct a full examination, before he will allow the developer back to the platform, a representative of Facebook told VOX.
Facebook comments, what Type of permission to a third party request — in other words, tell me why you need to know someone’s birthday for them to use your app — in the framework of the update to its API policy in 2015.
But there are still some questions about how reliable that review process. “It’s kind of dark underworld,” said Bogost. “In the shadows”.
4) how much third parties know about me?
Even if third parties could only obtain some of Your information — your home town, or, say, half they could match it with all kinds of other records, such marketing databases or databases of voter registration, to paint a more complete picture about you as a person.
And then, armed with all that good information that a third party cannot go in and retarget ads on Facebook for you that he’s already discovered. “It’s kind of a cycle,” said Bogost. “You get the attention of people and use it directly or extend it.”
Even the smallest nuggets of information quite valuable. Bogost checked it myself, building a Facebook game called cow Clicker. (He wrote about it in an interesting Atlantic article about how the data was extracted from Facebook.)
“If you played cow Clicker, even just once, – he wrote – I have enough of your personal information that for many years, I could collect quite a complex profile of Your interests and behavior. I might still be able; all the data is still there, stored on my private server, where the cow Clicker still works, allowing players to keep clicking where once stood the cow before my whim caught up to them in a digital void.”
If you took the test 10 years ago, the chances of third parties data collected will be 10 years old. This makes it less valuable, but has no value. “We don’t know who all these data from all of those years,” Vaidhyanathan said, “and how would they use it in the past and, even if it is incomplete or outdated as they use it now. No responsibility at all.”
5) I can find out who has my data?
Right now, there is no way to know all the third parties that can have your data. (Facebook is notifying everyone whose data could be shared with Cambridge Analytics.) You can see which apps you gave permission to your account Facebook, but You can’t see if, say, your data got collected, because a friend played a bunch of apps.
6) did Facebook know that this kind of third-party data collection would happen, or was it unintentional?
Matwyshyn said the question is not whether or not Facebook knew, but whether it reasonably should have known that this would happen. “And it was reasonable to anticipate that this kind of issue can happen,” she said.
It indicates an initial public offering of the company. “What they’ll say in a moment that their business is a business of relationships,” she said. “They connect people and exchange information on Facebook to help spread information, whether the connection of the audience to marketers or connecting individuals to other persons.”
7) how has Facebook changed its policy?
Facebook changes its privacy policy, a limited amount of relevant information that may be available to developers — most importantly, the data of your friends who are not actively involved in these applications. (Cambridge Analytics collect all these data before these policy changes.)
Part of the reason that changed in 2015, because the social network found that it was better for business to keep all this information about its millions of users in the house, said Vaidhyanathan.
In the period from 2010 to 2015, Vaidhyanathan explained, Facebook was focused primarily on the rapidly growing business. “So farmville or words with friends was very important,” he said. “Those levels of the game keep people engaged on Facebook and keep people engaged with their friends on Facebook.”
In other words, Facebook really need these things to help you hooked in the first few days. This is not so; it grows without these apps. “They have no reason to give [data] to anyone else,” said Vaidhyanathan.
Said Matwyshyn understand Facebook information is a powerful commodity — even if the users posting baby pictures and share links to the news do not necessarily see it the same way. “Consumers don’t necessarily connect the dots that if someone knows their political preferences, their health, their favorite flavor of ice cream, their mother’s maiden name, the names of all his brothers and sisters, the name of their Pets, and where they were in sequence in the last six months, that’s a lot of information that can be used,” she said.
8) I have a lot of apps that use my account Facebook. I thought this would improve my life. These companies are just trying to grub my data all the time?
It is a compromise. These apps do use Facebook logins to make it easier to use their services, because it also makes your life easier — no additional passwords or user names to track this way. Said Bogost reducing friction is the main purpose of these services.
But of course, this means that the app has your email address can be Your photos, and other information, RUB, to help you to enter into his service.
9) in multi Facebook, is there anything I can do to protect my data?
Matwyshyn suggests that this kind of tripartite process — part technical, part social, and part resignation to the reality Facebook. You can change your privacy settings and read the terms of service. You can help your friends to change their privacy settings.
“And some of it is less pleasant recognition of the fact that when you post things, you should think not only about what this post would mean that today, in terms of the information you want to share with your friends, but what this information might say about you in five months in the hands of the party who wanted to use it to harm you in some way,” she said.
Vaidhyanathan said he did not know that there are a lot of people could do questions Facebook is too vast and he believes that any real solution requires action from the government or regulations. He believes that the solution decays Facebook — carving from Instagram and whatsapp, for example, Facebook has some competition. At least, Facebook can extend the rules of data protection implemented in Europe for all users.
But the bigger problem Vaidhyanathan suggests one that is much harder to fix: the gap between what users expect Facebook social network and how Facebook sees itself — what is actually the point of this question.
“The people at the top of Facebook think that it’s good for Facebook good for humanity and Vice versa,” said Vaidhyanathan. “They really believe if they get more data, they can figure out how to use it, they can roll out services that will improve our lives, it will all be worth it.
“As we go along with it all and our life will be better,” he added. “This is a fundamental basic principle of Facebook”.
Sourse: vox.com
