Facebook and data security

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Facebook and data security

#1 Post by Technic[Bot] »

Another day another important company caught with is pant down misusing customer data.
This time it was Facebook. The social media giant let analytics firm Cambridge analityca scrape data illegally from facebook wich it then used to psychologicaly profile voters in both the US election and Brexit vote.
A nice summary of the whole thing can be found here.
Most other news outlet have decent account of what happen, like the BBC for example. So i won't spend too much time repeating them here. Suffice to say Facebook is very bad at keeping you data secure and/or keeping third-parties from misusing your data.
So what can you do about it? Deleting you account seems like a better choice by every passing minute but sometimes that is not realistic, there is people i can only contact via facebook. So what else can be done? For the small fractions of fellow forumites who also use facebook. I found two interesting tools you can use.
Gobo A media aggregator that filters your facebook based on you own preferences, no some algorithm made by the MIT media lab
Facebook container A small add-on for mozilla that "containerizes" your facebook session making it hard to track you across multiple sites.

On top of that a good ad-blocker usually prevents cookies from tracking you. In mobile land, firefox-focus is a privacy oriented browser that makes it almost impossible for sites to track you, as it create disposable sessions.
Finally it is probably a good idea to go into you faceboo settings account and check the ads sections to check what the plattaform knows about you.

In any case this was just a small PSA, hope someone finds this useful.
Happy foruming!
There are three things that motivate people: Money, fear and love.
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Twokinds [of] data
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