social networks – barilo.me

Everyone and their mother wrote about the recent Facebook user data leak. If you didn’t notice or decided not to care because it’s yet another fuck-up by the blue app, who can blame you? But what is interesting, as Wired reports, is that it’s hard to find where this data actually came from. Facebook just says it’s from 2019 leak and now it just got published. Nothing to see here. But there were a couple that year. Surprise.

In short, the leak available online contains data on roughly 533 million users. E-mails, phone numbers, Facebook IDs and a lot of other information. The leak included information on various politicians and Mark Zuckerberg himself.

You can easily check if you are affected on HaveIBeenPwned website. It’s actually a good resource to keep at hand because it checks all the available leaks. My data wasn’t in this one, but there were a couple of others to worry about.

Regardless of the result I started wandering, what information Facebook has on me. I went to Facebook settings (actually opened Facebook for the first time since November) and requested a download of all the information from my profile. After a couple of hours I got a link for around 500 MB of data.

It starts with the obvious — all your posts, friends, likes, comments, photos and videos. There are also devices, IP addresses and locations you’ve logged into Facebook. If you’ve used voice features, there would be recordings (not for me).

There are also some things that Facebook tries to guess about you, like for example your interests (which were pretty meh for me):

Or life stage description of your friends:

It also keeps every profile you’ve visited and when, what you were searching for and what languages you might speak.

Then there is a list of companies who uploaded your contact information to Facebook to spam you with their offers — almost every popular app or store you’ve registered in.

The most interesting is your activity outside of Facebook. In my case, among others there was a local bank Luminor which reports to Facebook every time I open the app.

I know it’s automatic, but let it just sink in, a bank in Latvia is telling a social networking company in the US about every time I’ve opened their app. Just why?

There is much more activity from another bank — Citadele, but I found it hard to understand what it corresponds to.

You can actually turn off this activity outside Facebook “feature”, but as Facebook itself warns before you do, it’s not actually turning it off.

Although I know it’s hard to actually delete information from the Internet and there are shadow profiles on Facebook, I still think this is the only logical step. As I mentioned, I wasn’t using the social network for six months, so I don’t think I will miss it.

Surprisingly, the process of deleting the account looks fairly straightforward, you just choose Delete:

It even reminds you to download all the information (which I already did):

After that, you have 30 days to reinstate your account, which I did once accidentally.

If you log in to Facebook by mistake in those 30 days, it will just … log you in, without even asking and the “deletion” process will be stopped. So, you have to be careful. I had to go through the deletion procedure for the second time.

There are still Instagram and WhatsApp installed on my phone. I’ll have to decide about those later. Although moving from WhatsApp is impossible now because of work, I already started minimizing the number of chats I have there. Instagram on the other hand I think will have the same trajectory as Facebook, I will use it for some time and at some point I just won’t.

First of all, as it often is with those types of stories – The Verge did a great job with presenting the article. Audio clips integrated into the story, so you can hear Zuckerberg’s voice, not only read the redacted quote is an interesting choice and I would actually like to see more of that.

Regarding the story itself. I think social media platforms, especially one as big as Facebook should be neutral. It is a rare thing that I agree with Zuckerberg, but here we are. A couple of quotes from him:

“That basically asked whether Joel can be in this role, or can be doing this role, on the basis of the fact that he is a Republican, or has beliefs that are more conservative than the average employee at the company. And I have to say that I find that line of questioning to be very troubling.
If we want to actually do a good job of serving people, [we have to take] into account that there are different views on different things, and that if someone disagrees with a view, that doesn’t necessarily mean that they’re hateful or have bad intent.”

Reading the US Twitter, I don’t know how anyone can remain sane. People are almost willing to kill one another because of the political affiliation. And I also find the way the question is asked regarding the Republican employee very troubling.

I also don’t get the walking out part of employees. If you don’t like the way the company is being run – leave. This “virtual walk out” for a day, when you have a nice job with pretty high salary is nothing more than a virtue signaling.

You shouldn’t work for a manager that you so strongly disagree with. Otherwise it is hard to believe your believes.

Can we build a quarantined Facebook city? an employee had asked ahead of the July 31st Q&A. Like, buying an island and all of us working there?
Zuckerberg read the question out loud, laughing gently.
“Gosh, I don’t think that that would be good long-term,” he responded. “I think it’s good to maintain connection to the rest of society.”

Fascinating answer. It shows how Zuckerberg really feels like something more than people at large. And I’m not sure how someone who bought out all the houses around his can say something about maintaining connection with the rest the society.

Tag - social networks