PD Editorial: Facebook’s privacy faceplant

It turns out that handing a ton of personal information over to Facebook isn’t a good way to keep it private, especially if you don’t take some simple steps to protect it.

As recently reported, a company called Cambridge Analytica acquired 50 million Facebook users’ personal data. It hoped to transform that data into valuable psychological models for targeting persuasive political messages at people. It sold its services first to Ted Cruz’s presidential campaign, then to Donald Trump’s.

This sort of activity isn’t new. President Barrack Obama’s campaign team mined social media data and targeted marketing years ago, just not with such subterfuge.

Facebook vehemently insists that this wasn’t a data breach. That parsing helps Mark Zuckerberg’s company because it didn’t report the incident as required by an earlier federal consent agreement. If it were a data breach, then the company could be in even bigger trouble.

Yet in some ways a data breach might have been preferable, at least for consumers.

A data breach would mean hackers broke in and stole the data. The company, assuming it had taken reasonable security measures, would be a victim, too. If it’s not a breach, it’s something more insidious. Personal data about millions of people wound up in a bad place through mostly legitimate implementation of Facebook’s business model.

There are some technical caveats to that. A researcher harvested the information when 270,000 Facebook users voluntarily took a survey. They didn’t know the app also collected data about their friends who never consented to participate. Cambridge Analytica was supposed to delete the data after it was caught, but it reportedly did not. And Facebook knew about this for years and didn’t think it was worth telling?50 million people whose data was loose.

The fallout from these revelations probably will play out over years. Facebook’s stock value has taken a nosedive. Cambridge Analytica suspended its CEO. There’s even talk about congressional hearings and new regulations.

Enforceable, transparent consumer protections are certainly overdue, but people shouldn’t just wait for them. Recall that people voluntarily took the survey that started all this. There are a lot of suckers out there. Don’t be one of them.

It’s unrealistic to think that people will abandon social media in large numbers. Facebook and other platforms are crucial communications tools. Entire industries have grown around them, and even old industries like newspapers rely on them.

Facebook doesn’t promote its privacy settings well because its targeted advertising and profits rely on people’s willingness to give up their privacy. But the settings are there, and they give some level of protection against losing control of your data and any ensuing psychological manipulation.

Head into your settings and check your privacy options today. Then check your Facebook app settings. For maximum privacy, disable apps, websites and plugins. That will break some things, though. At a minimum, uncheck all options under “Apps Others Use” so that when one of your friends uses an invasive app, it doesn’t get access to your data without your consent.

It used to be that people could rely on the anonymity of being just one person in a big virtual crowd. No longer. Powerful computers and algorithms build finely grained psychological profiles.

If you must use social media - and most people pretty much must - at least don’t make it easy for the firms that want to exploit you.