Did I really sign up for exposing my entire identity (not anonymized) when I created my Facebook account more than a decade ago?
I always thought our digital and physical data resides in silos (health care companies, DMV, IRS, USCIS, financial institutes, social media etc)and at any given moment these big organizations have access to ONLY a part of our identity but is it really true? Cambridge Analytica scandal just answered this question, NO. If you search for digital identity companies on internet, there are 100s of them, each claiming to have most number of anonymized digital identities, the key is “anonymized”. Facebook is definitely not the top most company in the list of google search for digital identity(is it because they have everything in clear). Facebook used to use 98 personal points in 2016 (may be more in 2018) to target potential Facebook users for advertisers and this data included personal information, family history, financial history, behavior (both personal and public) and devices history. All this information combined with may be criminal, immigration and driving history is all I have got.
Is this the first time when concerns have been raised about privacy problems with Facebook. In 2015, an intern was fired for publishing a chrome extension called “Marauder’s map”, a loophole in Facebook messenger’s geolocation to track friends and the scariest part was the location accuracy was within 3 feet. There are always two sides to the coin, sharing personal information can also help you in emergency situations. Sometimes, a message, a tweet, a status update can be a lifesaver if the geolocation is enabled. May be, that’s why my geolocation sharing is still enabled.
While I was busy penning my thoughts, I also downloaded a copy Facebook data and they have access to my pictures, videos, places I visited, contact numbers on phone, list of my friends and also the list of people I am no longer friends with. Not only this, they also have details on which ads did I click on, installed applications on my phone, advertisers who have access to my data and many more. It is a lot of information about me, there are somethings are want to forget about, but do I have a choice?
Technology is intrusive and when we sign ourselves up on social media we also sign up for giving up our personal information. We should have the right to be forgotten (either completely or partially) and it should not only be a moral but legal obligation for social media/any company having access to our public/personal data to make us aware of the risks and ways to better protect our data. EU data protection laws will probably be the game changer, where people in some geographies will have equal rights to be remembered and forgotten along with stronger consumer consent. This will also impact US and other countries in a good way because more and more companies are getting global in nature. Apple recently made it easy for the users to access their data, correct their data residing with apple and make a decision on data portability. Hopefully, we will have more control on our data in coming years.