How to Protect Yourself (and Your Friends) on Facebook
Revelations that a voter-profiling company that worked Donald Trump’s presidential campaign harvested private information from 50 million Facebook profiles has many people wondering: What, if anything, they can do to protect their data connected to the social network?
Posted — UpdatedRevelations that a voter-profiling company that worked Donald Trump’s presidential campaign harvested private information from 50 million Facebook profiles has many people wondering: What, if anything, they can do to protect their data connected to the social network?
Here’s the harsh truth: Not much, short of ceasing to browse the web entirely or deleting your Facebook account.
Yet there are some best practices you can employ to help safeguard your data, such as installing software to block web-tracking technologies and carefully vetting the apps that you use on Facebook.
But it also helps to understand what exactly happened with those 50 million profiles in order to determine how you can better protect your data. Here’s what you need to know.
An academic researcher at Cambridge University built an app called thisisyourdigitallife, which offered to pay Facebook users to take a personality test and agree to share that data for academic use. About 270,000 people participated in the study — enough to extract information on tens of millions of Facebooks users.
How did Cambridge Analytica get data on 50 million people when only 270,000 people had agreed to hand over their information to a third party? Facebook said people who downloaded the app gave consent for the app to collect limited information about their friends whose privacy settings were set to allow it.
That information was eventually paid for by Cambridge Analytica, the voter profiling company that worked with the Trump campaign.
There is a multipronged approach you can take to protect yourself from data-harvesting apps and programs. That includes tools you can install in your browser and settings you can tweak on Facebook. Here’s a rundown of what you should do:
Here’s a primer on how tracking works, to give you a sense of why blockers are important: When you engage with an app on Facebook, it may plant a tracker in your web browser, like a cookie, that collects information from you. Even when you close out of the app, the tracker can continue to follow your activities, like the other sites you visit or the people you interact with through status updates, according to Michael Priem, chief executive of Modern Impact, an advertising firm in Minneapolis.
“It doesn’t go away after you’ve stopped looking at the ad,” he said.
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