Managing Your Privacy on Facebook

Aug 28, 2018

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This chapter is from the book 

My Facebook for Seniors, 4th Edition

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Viewing Your Facebook Information

Facebook collects a lot of data about you but lets you see what it’s collected. (You’ll be surprised how much it collects!)

Access and Manage Your Information

You can view and manage the data Facebook collects about you from the Privacy Shortcuts screen, from either the mobile app or the Facebook website.

From the Privacy Shortcuts screen, scroll to the Your Facebook Information section.

Tap or click Access Your Information to view your posts, photos and videos, comments, likes and reactions, friends, people you’re following and those who are following you, messages, groups, events, profile information, pages, Marketplace activity, payment history, saved items, places you’ve created, apps and websites you log into using Facebook, ad-related info, information associated with your Facebook account, search history, location history, calls and messages, and security and login information.

Tap or click See Your Activity Log to view a log of your recent Facebook activity.

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Tap or click Manage Your Information to edit your personal information.

Tap or click Delete Your Account and Information to delete your Facebook account.

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>>>GO FURTHER: FACEBOOK’S PRIVACY PROBLEMS

Facebook has a problem with privacy. Over the years, it has let numerous third parties have access to user information, including just about everything you and your friends have done on the Facebook site—and you haven’t known it was happening.

Perhaps the biggest breach of privacy was unearthed in the aftermath of the 2016 presidential elections. A company named Cambridge Analytica gathered information on up to 87 million Facebook users and used that data to identify voter personalities and attempt to influence their vote (in favor of the Donald Trump campaign, its client).

How it worked was simple. Back in 2014, Cambridge Analytica created one of those cute little personality quizzes, called thisisyourdigitallife, in which users answer a series of seemingly innocuous questions and then the app says what kind of personality they are. In the process of taking this quiz, users gave the app permission to access their Facebook data—and the data of everyone on their friends list. More than 270,000 users took the quiz, which ultimately harvested personal data on close to 87 million users. (Everybody who took the quiz had a few hundred friends, it seems.) Whereas the people who took the quiz gave (tacit) permission to use their data, the other 87 million or so users gave no such permission.

The problem was, back in 2014, Facebook’s privacy rules permitted third parties to access the data of participant’s friends without their permission. A year or so later, Facebook changed its rules to prohibit this scraping of data. So a company trying to do this in 2016 would only have garnered the data from the people who took the quiz, not their friends. But back in 2014, when Cambridge Analytica offered the “quiz,” this sort of behavior was allowed.

Not surprisingly, when the Cambridge Analytica situation came to light, it garnered a fair amount of negative publicity. Mark Zuckerberg, the founder and CEO of Facebook, had to appear before both Senate and Congressional committees to answer questions relating to this issue. It was a big deal.

The specific issue—sharing data without users’ awareness or permission—had already been addressed with updated Facebook privacy guidelines. The ongoing issue, however, that Facebook uses your information and behavior to not only offer up a better user experience but also to make money (by selling ads based on your activity), remains.

To get the most out of Facebook, you need to let the company know as much about you and what you do on its site (and beyond) as you’re comfortable with. If you don’t let Facebook know all this about you, not only will you have a less fulfilling experience, Facebook also won’t make as much money from targeted advertising. And if Facebook doesn’t make as much money from advertisers, it might have to start charging users.

You see, the bigger issue here, well beyond Facebook, is that we all like to get stuff for free. We want free social networking from Facebook, free search from Google, free information from Wikipedia, and so on. However, those services you get for free have to be paid for: There are programmers to be paid, office space to be leased, equipment to be purchased, and so forth. Typically, the companies that offer the services pay for the costs through advertising. Advertisers pay good money to get in front of potential customers, and the more targeted their ads, the more they’re willing to pay.

So if you want Facebook to remain free, you have to accept those annoying ads that keep cropping up in your News Feed. And you have to accept that Facebook will use the information it collects about you to help sell those ads. In a way, Facebook isn’t the product here—you are.

Unless you want to start paying to use Facebook and Twitter and Google and all the other good stuff on the Internet, you have to accept both advertising and some invasion of your privacy. The only alternatives are for Facebook et al. to start charging for their services or for you to stop using those services. In fact, the only way to ensure complete privacy and security is to not use any online services at all.

Not surprisingly, some people are choosing this latter option. Post-Cambridge Analytica scandal, a fair number of Facebook users have stopped using the service and deleted their accounts. Not a lot, but some. That might be the best route for some people, although it does take you out of the social-media loop. (Other social media, such as Twitter, have the identical problem, of course.)

If this works for you, great. Otherwise, follow the instructions in this chapter to minimize your privacy risk and still get the most you can out of Facebook and other social media. There may be no perfect solution to this issue, but you can do what you can do.

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