Shocking internal document is reason enough to ditch Facebook for good
Facebook collects a ton of data on your habits and online activities. That much almost everyone is aware of. It isn’t the only company that builds a user profile with your information, as Google, Amazon and even Twitter use data to serve you better results.
The sites scrape the information together from anything you interact with, whether products, your friends, or businesses you buy from. Once a profile of your habits has enough data points, it is often passed on to third-party advertisers.
Most of the services know where that data goes. But read on to see what makes Facebook’s data collection extremely dangerous.
Here’s the backstory
Four years ago, Facebook got raked over the coals after discovering that Cambridge Analytica stole the data of millions of Facebook users through a third-party app. The subsequent probe involved the FBI, the SEC and the Justice Department.
At the time, the social media giant claimed that it didn’t know about Cambridge Analytica’s activities. However, not knowing where your data is used seems to be a central theme, as a leaked document reveals that Facebook doesn’t know where the user data comes from or where it is stored.
As more countries enforce stricter data privacy regulations, Facebook engineers penned a report that bluntly admits that the social media platform won’t be able to agree to certain conditions because it doesn’t know what happens with its data.
The document’s executive summary notes, “We do not have an adequate level of control and explainability over how our systems use data, and thus we can’t confidently make controlled policy changes or external commitments.”
It goes on to say that Facebook can’t agree not to use specific data, yet “this is exactly what regulators expect us to do.”
What you can do about it
Even by Facebook’s standards, the report is shocking. The engineers argue that it will “require additional multi-year investments” if Facebook wants to know how user data is collected, used and released.
What does this mean for you? If Facebook can’t figure out how your data is used or where it’s coming from, who else has access to it?
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