I teetered on the brink of deleting my facebook account last year. I removed the main app from my phone and a Windows tablet, and have never installed messenger. When it came down to it I balked at the final step. I did ulike pretty much all businesses and pages, as well as unfriended anyone not a real contact/friend etc.
The utility of facebook is still too great to remove myself completely. Although frankly I’ve had better results contacting businesses through Twitter and getting things done. Given it’s reach, facebook still remains useful. Delete the apps Facebook, Facebook Messenger, Instagram and Whatsapp.
If you want to delete your facebook account, it’s still relatively simple and you have 14-days to recover it, if you decide it was a mistake. Use this URL.
The Guardian published this over the weekend. It’s a long and important read that contains all the context and background detail into how Facebook was used to target people with advertising and social profiling of potentailly millions of people to bias or persuade them to take a particular perspective.
Much of this data came through those terrible apps which ask you to confirm access to your facebook profile, and your friends profile. Even though you may have never used one of these apps, if your friends did, they likely gave away your data.
The New York Times is today reporting that Facebooks Chief Information Security officer is leaving the company. So this is obviously a big deal. Alex himself denies that, although with the share price drop already seen today, who knows the truth, the data misappropriation is still a big deal.
Charles Arthur has a daily email which goes out under the guise of The Overspill from his blog of the same name. It’s well worth the subscription. Todays included a link to Justin Hendrix blog for justsecurity.org on the Facebook data use, in it Justin poses seven key questions:
1. Why did Facebook take more than two years to inform the public of this massive breach?
2. Did the Trump campaign or Cambridge Analytica violate campaign finance laws?
3. Did Trump campaign or Cambridge Analytica employees lie to Congress, or to the British Parliament?
4. Did Facebook’s failure to disclose this breach to the public and notify its directly affected consumers break any laws?
5. Did any of the Facebook embeds in the Trump campaign know that stolen data was being used for targeting?
6. Did Facebook have evidence its own employees mishandled this situation? Was any disciplinary action taken?
7. Did other organizations or individuals exploit these apparent weaknesses, and are there other breaches we do not know about?
Irrespective of what you think about how the data was used, and the outcome, these questions need to be answered.