e-traces

“Facebook isn’t really a social network. It’s barely even an advertising company. It’s a data analytics firm, which manages to use its position as the middleman for a vast proportion of all human communication to find out everything there is to know about its users.”

“If you think you’re a passive user of Facebook, minimising the data you provide to the site or refraining from oversharing details of your life, you have probably underestimated the scope of its reach. Facebook doesn’t just learn from the pictures you post, and the comments you leave: the site learns from which posts you read and which you don’t; it learns from when you stop scrolling down your feed and how long it takes you to restart; it learns from your browsing on other websites that have nothing to do with Facebook itself; and it even learns from the messages you type out then delete before sending (the company published an academic paper on this “self-censorship” back in 2013).”

Richard Stallman:

“Any database of personal data will be misused, if a misuse can be imagined by humans. It can be misused by the organisation that collects the data. In many cases, the purpose of collecting it is to misuse it, as in the case of Facebook, but also in the case of Amazon, Google to some extent, and thousands of smaller companies as well.

“It can also be misused by rogue employees of the company and it can also be stolen by some third party and misused. There’d be no danger of data breaches if a database doesn’t exist. And, finally, it can be taken by the state and misused.”

The only disappointing thing about the article is that is asks the question, but does not really try to answer it.

Any database of personal data will be misused, if a misuse can be imagined by humans.

=>

Any database of personal data will be misused. A misuse allways will be imagined by humans.