Following what we’ve learned about information shared by Facebook during the 2016 election cycle, some of my friends are signing off altogether and headed to MeWe, another social media site. That action had me wondering what I should do too. I have purposely used Facebook more as a way to attract readers to this blog and less about my personal life. However it’s easy enough for Facebook to learn a lot about a user by the company we keep and the feeds we “like.”
Looking for advice, I emailed CWEnder David Strom who has been writing about IT-technology for 25+ years and publishes a newsletter called the Web Informant. (Strom has written a few guests posts for this blog too, look here, here, and here.) His answer appeared in a detailed newsletter he published this morning, which he has given me permission to share.
In case you think this information is way out of your league, try to at least click on NY Times reporter Brian Chen’s piece about what he found out about himself on Facebook, and read what Strom found out when he did the same thing. Be sure to watch the video at the top of the NY Times article for a clearer understanding on how Facebook works. That should get your attention.
Toward the end of Strom’s Learning about what data your social media keeps about you (in its entirety here), there is an Action section, which is available below.
From today’s Web Informant by David Strom:
Brian Chen’s recent piece about social media privacy in the NY Times inspired me to look more closely at the information that the major social networks have collected on me. Be warned: once you start down this rabbit hole, you can’t unlearn what you find. Chen says it is like opening Pandora’s box. I think it is more like trying to look at yourself from the outside in. There is a lot of practical information and tips here, you might want to file this edition of Web Informant away for future reference when you have the time to absorb all of it.
Why bother? For one thing, the exercise is interesting, and will give you insights into how you use social media and whether you should change what and how you post on these networks in the future. It also shows you how advertisers leverage your account – after all, they are the ones paying the bills (to the news of some US Senators). And if you are concerned about your privacy or want to leave one or more of these networks, it is a good idea to understand what they already know about you before you begin a scrub session to limit the access of your personal information to the social network and its connected apps. Also, if you are thinking about leaving, it would be nice to have a record of your contacts before you pull the plug.
None of the networks make obtaining this information simple, and that is probably on purpose. I have provided links to the starting points in the process, but you first will want to login to each network before navigating to these pages. In all cases, you initiate the request, which will take hours to days before each network replies with an email that either contains a download link or an attached file with the information. You need to download the file(s) within a certain time limit, otherwise the links will expire and you will have to issue another request.
The results range from scary to annoyingly detailed and almost unreadable. And after you get all this data, there are additional activities that you will probably want to do to either clean up your account or tighten your privacy and security. Hang on, and good luck with your own journey down the road to better social network transparency about your privacy.
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/dyi?
Facebook sends you an HTML collection of various items, some useful and some not. You download a ZIP archive. There is a summary of your profile, a collection of your posts to your timeline, a list of all of your friends (including those who have left Facebook) and when you connected with them, and any videos and photos that you have posted. Two items that are worth more inspection are a list of advertisers that have your information: I noticed quite a few entries to more than a dozen different state chapters of Americans for Prosperity PACs that are funded by the Koch brothers. Finally, there is a list of your phone’s contacts that it grabbed if you ran its Messenger application, which it justifiably has been getting a lot of heat for doing. Note that this is different from your friend list.
There is much more on other social media sites in the newsletter here.
And here are the Action items mentioned above:
Action items
So what should you do? First, delete the Facebook Messenger phone app right away, unless you really can’t live without it. You contacts are still preserved by Facebook, but at least going forward you won’t have them snooping over your shoulder. You can still send messages in the Web app, which should be sufficient for your communications.
Second, start your pruning sessions. As I hinted in the Twitter entry above, you should examine the privacy-related settings along with the connected apps that you have selected on each of the four networks. The privacy settings are confusing and opaque to begin with, so take some time to study what you have selected. The connected apps is where Facebook got into trouble (see Cambridge Analytica) earlier this month, so make sure you delete the apps that you no longer use. I usually do this annually, since I test a lot of apps and then forget about them, so it is nice to keep their number as small as possible. In my case, I turned off the Facebook platform entirely, so I lost all of these apps. But I figured that was better than their hollow promises and apologies. Your feelings may be similar.
Third, protect your collected data. Don’t leave this data that you get from the social networks on any computer that is either mobile or online (which means just about every computer nowadays). I would recommend copying it to a CD (or in Google’s case, several DVDs) and then deleting it from your hard drive. Call me paranoid, or careful. There is a lot of information that could be used to compromise your identity if this gets into the wrong hands.
Finally, think carefully about what information you give up when you sign up for a new social network. There is no point in leaving Facebook (or anyone else) if you are going to start anew and have the same problems with someone else down the road. In my case, I never gave any network my proper birthday – that seems now like a good move, although probably anyone could figure it out with a few careful searches.
If you want more of this kind of technical information about your digital life, subscribe to David Strom’s Web Informant newsletters here. Contact information: david@strom.com.
P.S. – I removed the Facebook Messenger app from my phone as soon as I read the newsletter. Strom also suggests removing your real birthday from Facebook, which I did following one of Web Informant’s seminars last summer. That task wasn’t exactly a piece of cake, so am not sure how much of this I can do on my own, but I think it’s worth a try. Hope you get something out of this post too.
Thanks as always for this great information David!