TIL: Facebook Doesn’t Tell Users Everything It Really Knows About Them

I use Facebook because, to paraphrase Willie Sutton, when he was asked why he robbed banks,
he replied, "Because that's where the money is."

Well love it or hate it, everybody is on Facebook. Family, friends and some lost family & friends.

But, I'm not on Facebook so they can collect information about my welfare or how many eggs I've had for breakfast.
Or If I was an Afro-American one armed Afghan Veteran right winger who likes Sushi.
I'm neither, as they will already know.
So yes I can get a mortgage, or go down to Tesco's and get the right kind of bread.
But my shopping list will be, according to ProPublica, on Zuckerballs desk before I've unpacked my bags.

They are collecting a shit load of information that can and will be used against the users, if they step out of line.

I have read a few of the Bernie Gunther Books by Philip Kerr about a Berlin cop during the Nazi Realm in the 1930s
They didn't have access to this kind of information back then.
But that was then and this, as we are being constantly told, is now.

In January the new USA Caesar Trump and his collection of hand picked Aristocrats will be in power on behalf of the grateful US Plebeians who cast their vote.

So what,possibly could go wrong;D~

With great power comes, invariably, great corruption.
And your starter pack for 10 will be, immediate Government access to the Facebook Motherlode.

Number one on the new Government agenda will be.
Just who exactly is buying up all those Prepper books and Bug out Bags.
Get me a list. As they are clearly Anti-American.

The Schindler's List remake is coming your way very soon.

Anyway, whoops their goes gravity, back to reality,
ProPublica is trying to awake awareness in the sleeping giant we call the Facebook users.
I am not so convinced it will ever happen. Are you?

Images Courtsey of Pixabay

Facebook’s site says it gets information about its users “from a few different sources.”

What the page doesn’t say is that those sources include detailed dossiers obtained from commercial data brokers about users’ offline lives. Nor does Facebook show users any of the often remarkably detailed information it gets from those brokers.

“They are not being honest,” said Jeffrey Chester, executive director of the Center for Digital Democracy. “Facebook is bundling a dozen different data companies to target an individual customer, and an individual should have access to that bundle as well.”

When asked this week about the lack of disclosure, Facebook responded that it doesn’t tell users about the third-party data because it’s widely available and was not collected by Facebook.

“Our approach to controls for third-party categories is somewhat different than our approach for Facebook-specific categories,” said Steve Satterfield, a Facebook manager of privacy and public policy. “This is because the data providers we work with generally make their categories available across many different ad platforms, not just on Facebook.”

Satterfield said users who don’t want that information to be available to Facebook should contact the data brokers directly. He said users can visit a page in Facebook’s help center, which provides links to the opt-outs for six data brokers that sell personal data to Facebook.

Limiting commercial data brokers’ distribution of your personal information is no simple matter. For instance, opting out of Oracle’s Datalogix, which provides about 350 types of data to Facebook according to our analysis, requires “sending a written request, along with a copy of government-issued identification” in postal mail to Oracle’s chief privacy officer.

Users can ask data brokers to show them the information stored about them. But that can also be complicated. One Facebook broker, Acxiom, requires people to send the last four digits of their social security number to obtain their data. Facebook changes its providers from time to time so members would have to regularly visit the help center page to protect their privacy.

One of us actually tried to do what Facebook suggests. While writing a book about privacy in 2013, reporter Julia Angwin tried to opt out from as many data brokers as she could. Of the 92 brokers she identified that accepted opt-outs, 65 of them required her to submit a form of identification such as a driver’s license. In the end, she could not remove her data from the majority of providers.

Read the full Article here:
https://www.propublica.org/article/facebook-doesnt-tell-users-everything-it-really-knows-about-them

image courtsey of @reneenouveau

Badge Courtsey of @elyaque