Ride the Lightning

Facebook: What Are You Going to Do Now?

March 29, 2018

John has avoided Facebook like the plague, believing it to be inherently evil. Turns out he's not far from wrong. The lawsuits and government investigations are piling up, here and abroad.

The horse is well and truly out of the barn – you've already lost control of the data that was leaked. Worse yet, you agreed to it, as did I. You can delete Facebook of course, but the data that's out there will remain out there – and don't be surprised if complete deletion doesn't end up meaning what the words say.

Leave Facebook? It's hard – for many of us, that's where friends and family are. I was always reasonably careful with Facebook, not prone to giving away a lot of personal data. But I revealed some, for sure. And as my friend Jim Calloway notes, even when you have location services turned off, Facebook tracks you.

As reported by ABC News and many others, Facebook has announced an overhaul of its security and privacy settings. Read the story, but the updates include tools to find, download and delete your data as well as a simplified settings menu accessed from a single place. There is also a new privacy shortcuts menu where you can control who sees your posts, profile information, etc.

Mr. Zuckerberg, no one believes that you didn't know that this problem existed – and that it was massive. He says he is sorry, but he is like a child who plaintively says he's sorry when he's really just sorry he got caught. That's my take, for what it's worth. Don't tell me he didn't know that Facebook was logging users' calls and texts.

One of the biggest nightmares is how Facebook shared data with apps. This is a problem you can solve. The Electronic Frontier Foundation has a post called "How to Change Your Facebook Settings to Opt Out of Platform API Sharing." You should never have agreed to log into apps with your Facebook log-in. This will put a stop to that. I never did that, but when I did the opt-out, I noted that some of my news apps would no longer allow me to share directly to Facebook through my phone. A minor nuisance in the big scheme of things. For those who have a lot of apps linked to Facebook, it will be a chore to clean up the mess.

But if you don't want to leave Facebook, at least tighten your control over it. And let's hope the regulators (and litigators) keep the heat turned up on Facebook.

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