THE FACEBOOK PROBLEM & WHAT CAN YOU DO NOW

Mark Bazrod MACS@PACS April 21, 2018

Psychographics is the study and classification of people according to their attitudes, interests, opinions, beliefs, aspirations, values, & other psychological criteria, lifestyles and behavior. Psychographics takes demographics beyond the e x t e r n a l t o f o c u s o n t h e i n t e r n a l p s y c h o l o g y . D e m o g r a p h i c s i s w h o b u y s , psychographics is why they buy. It has been used extensively in advertising and marketing. More recently it is used in political campaigns. It can be extremely manipulative and dangerous.

PSYCHOGRAPHIC MODELING TECHNIQUES

Cambridge Analytica, an upstart voter-profiling company, had a problem. Christopher Wylie, one of CA’s British founders, was interested in using inherent psychological traits to identify the personalities of American voters and influence their behavior. He had assembled a team of psychologists and data scientists. Robert Mercer, the wealthy Republican donor, agreed to help finance a $1.5 million pilot project to test psychographic messaging in Virginia’s gubernatorial race in November 2013. But CA didn’t have the data to make its new products work. Mr. Wylie thought he found a solution at Cambridge University’s Psychometrics Centre. Researchers there had developed a technique to map personality traits based on what people had liked on Facebook. The researchers paid users small sums to take a personality quiz and download an app, which would scrape some private information from their profiles and those of their friends, activity that Facebook permitted at the time. When the Psychometrics Centre declined to work with the firm, Mr. Wylie found someone who would: Dr. Kogan, who was then a psychology professor at the university and knew of the techniques. Dr. Kogan built his own app and in June 2014 began harvesting data for Cambridge Analytica. The business covered the costs — more than $800,000. In the meantime CA secured a $15 million investment from Mercer, forming a joint venture with SCL’s election division. CA owned almost entirely by Mr. Mercer. Board members included Mercer’s daughter and Steve Bannon , who chose CA’s name.

CAMBRIDGE ANALYTICA

The data shared with Cambridge Analytica was taken via a personality quiz, called “ThisIsYourDigitalLife,” that was initially approved by Facebook for research purposes. All Kogan divulged to Facebook and to users in fine print was that he was collecting information for academic purposes. Facebook did not verify his claim. So Kogan harvested private information from the Facebook profiles of more than 87 million users without their permission, one of the largest data leaks in the social network’s history, and provided the data to CA. Only about 270,000 users — those who participated in the survey — had consented to having their data harvested. The others are “friends” of the 270,000.

CAMBRIDGE ANALYTICA

In July 2014, an American election lawyer advising the company warned that the arrangement could violate laws limiting the involvement of foreign nationals in American elections. In summer and fall 2014, Cambridge Analytica was involved in the U.S. midterm elections, mobilizing SCL contractors and employees around the country. Few Americans were involved in the work, which included polling, focus groups and message development for the John Bolton Super PAC, conservative groups in Colorado and the campaign of Senator Thom Tillis, the North Carolina Republican. Whether CA work violated election laws has yet to be determined. By early 2015, Mr. Wylie and more than half his original team of about a dozen people had left CA. Most were liberal-leaning, and had grown disenchanted with working on behalf of the hard-right candidates the Mercer family favored. CA was hired by the Trump organization and other Republicans. CA was banned from Facebook on March 16, 2018. The problem goes far beyond CA, and Facebook acknowledged to the Washington Post that data on most of the company’s 2 billion users has probably been accessed by outsiders without permission.

CAMBRIDGE ANALYTICA

The abuse of Facebook’s search tools -- now disabled -- happened far more broadly and over the course of several years, with few Facebook users likely escaping the scam. The scam started when malicious hackers harvested email addresses and phone numbers on the so-called “Dark Web,” where criminals post information stolen from data breaches over the years. Then the hackers used automated computer programs to feed the numbers and addresses into Facebook’s “search” box, allowing them to discover the full names of people affiliated with the phone numbers or addresses, along with whatever Facebook profile information they chose to make public, often including their profile photos and hometown. Facebook users could have blocked this search function, which was turned on by default, by tweaking their settings to restrict finding their identities by using phone numbers or email addresses. But users of online platforms rarely adjust default privacy settings and often fail to understand what information they are sharing.

OTHERS

Facebook hasn’t disclosed who the bad actors are, how the data might have been used, or exactly how many people were affected. Perhaps the most urgent question for Facebook is whether its practices ran afoul of a 2011 settlement with the Federal Trade Commission requiring Facebook to maintain a comprehensive privacy policy and ask permission before sharing user data in new ways. A former FTC director of consumer protection said Facebook is likely grossly out of compliance with the FTC consent decree. The Cambridge Analytica data set included user names, hometowns, work and educational histories, religious affiliations and Facebook “likes” of users and their friends, among other data.

FACEBOOK

Personal data on users and their Facebook friends was easily and widely available to developers of apps before 2015. The 2015 policy change curtailed developers’ abilities to access data about people’s friends networks, but left open many loopholes that the company recently tightened. Facebook is now banning apps from accessing users’ information about their religious or political views, relationship status, education, work history, fitness activity, book reading habits, music listening and news reading activity, video watching and games.

FACEBOOK

For many of Facebook’s prime growth years, the company gave outside developers access to virtually everything that a user who authorized an app, or her friends, had posted: her home town, current city, events and location check-ins; her interests, groups and all the pages she’d liked; her relationship statuses with romantic partners, friends and family; her birthday, activities, work history and political and religious affiliations; and her photos, notes and videos. Facebook changed its rules in 2015 amid concerns over how the data was being used. But for years, other developers had the power to construct the same kinds of massive microtargeted databases that had helped make Facebook so prominent. It’s unclear how many other services used that power or what they have done with the data pulled. But privacy experts called this the runaway data problem and suspect the data has already proliferated far beyond CA’s reach. “This data travels. And once it has spread, there is no way to get it back.”  

FACEBOOK

Facebook will soon introduce a new page allowing you to change your privacy & security settings from 1 place rather than roughly 20 sections.

WHAT YOU CAN DO

COMING!

It's in Facebook's best interests if everything you post and every image you upload remains visible to as many of your friends as possible. Therefore, the default settings facilitate open sharing between friends. Facebook gives you full access to your sharing settings, and it regularly updates its data pol icy. See Privacy Basics , a w a l k t h r o u g h d e s i g n e d t o m a k e understanding your settings a little easier.

WHAT YOU CAN DO

Your profile tells your story. You can choose:

what to share (www.facebook.com/help/1640261589632787?helpref=about_content), such as interests, photos and personal information like your hometown, and

who to share i t wi th (www.facebook.com/help/1297502253597210?helpref=about_content). Your profile also includes your Timeline, where you can see your own posts and posts you've been tagged in. Your Timeline and tagging settings (www.facebook.com/settings?tab=timeline) will help you manage tags and review who can add and see things on your Timeline.

YOUR PROFILE AND SETTINGS

Deleting your account is as simple as clicking on a few buttons — but untangling yourself from a site like Facebook is not as easy as pressing “delete.” It is inaccurate to say you have removed Facebook from your life just by leaving the site. Chances are you still use WhatsApp, the largest messaging app in the world, or Instagram, the most popular photo-sharing app. Facebook owns both. AND not everything is deleted. Keep in mind that Facebook isn’t the only company capable of collecting your information. One big culprit: Web trackers, like cookies embedded into websites and their ads. They are everywhere, and they follow your activities from site to site.

DELETE FACEBOOK ACCOUNT

There is no real substitute for Facebook if you’re looking for a social network that includes virtually everyone you meet in real life. Facebook has more than 2 billion monthly users.

DELETE FACEBOOK ACCOUNT

What other things are you losing access to if you delete Facebook? Why do so many apps require a Facebook login? One painful part of breaking up with Facebook would be potentially losing access to the many third-party apps and websites that are tied to your account. Many sites and apps teamed up with Facebook to use the company’s login tool, Facebook Login. Facebook Login. By clicking a button, you could sign up for an account with an app or website just by sharing your Facebook account data. That allowed you to skip manually entering details like your name and email address. This sped up the process of signing up for an account. If you were to delete Facebook, you would break your access to many sites and apps that you signed up for using Facebook Login. But many sites and apps still let you sign up for accounts directly through them, and many also let you log in through your Google account. It’s not impossible to delete Facebook. But it would be a long and tedious process to create new accounts for all the apps and sites you visit thru Facebook Login.

DELETE FACEBOOK ACCOUNT

You can permanently delete your account by clicking a few buttons on Facebook’s website. The company delays deletion for a few days, so do not log back in. Facebook also offers a tool for extracting a copy of your data before deleting your account. After you delete your account, it won’t be recoverable, except - You are only deleting the media you posted, like your status updates and photos that you uploaded. That’s not going to do much for your privacy, considering that an overwhelming amount of what you do on Facebook involves engaging with other people. If people uploaded photos of you, those photos will still be there, as will conversations you had with friends through Facebook.

DELETE FACEBOOK ACCOUNT

If you delete your account: • You can't regain access once it's deleted.

If you deactivate your account: • You can reactivate whenever you want. • People can't see your timeline or search for you. • Some information may remain visible to others

(example: messages you sent). To deactivate your account: • Click at the top right of any Facebook page, select

Settings > General > Manage your account and then scroll down to click Deactivate your account.

DIFFERENCE BETWEEN DEACTIVATING & DELETING

DECIDE ON PRIVACY SETTINGS Go to Settings > Privacy, and your privacy options broken down into 2 main categories: Your Activity and How People Find and Contact You. There are many options, but one of the most important is the very first: Who can see your future posts?

WHAT YOU CAN DO

WHAT YOU CAN DO

CLOSE THIRD-PARTY DATA COLLECTION. All those mobile apps, plug-ins, games, and websites that you linked to your Facebook account via Facebook Login gather info on you, too. For a complete list, visit the Apps section in Facebook’s Settings menu. To close the door on that snooping, you can turn off Facebook Platform, the utility that houses the apps and services created by those third-party developers. Go to Settings, select Apps, and click on the box titled Apps, Websites, and Plugins. Keep in mind that you will no longer be able to access the unlinked apps and services using your Facebook Login, so you may want to create new logins and passwords before you shut off Facebook Platform. LIMIT FACEBOOK TRACKING WITH AD BLOCKERS OR ANTI-TRACKERS. Many online sites feature code that tells Facebook what pages you visit. They do this by embedding on your computer tiny data files known as cookies and hidden images known as web beacons that track your movements, analyzing what you watch and read. You can cut down on this by installing a blocking extension (such as Disconnect, Ublock, or Privacy Badger) on your web browser. They only take a few seconds to download and activate.

WHAT YOU CAN DO

USE FIREFOX CONTAINER. The Mozilla Foundation has released an extension called Facebook Container. The extension "makes it harder for Facebook to track your activity on other websites via third-party cookies." To use it, download Firefox, go to the Firefox Add-ons page for Facebook Container, and click the Add to Firefox button.  Do this, and you'll be logged out of Facebook. When you navigate to Facebook the browser will open a new window. There, you can log back in and use Facebook normally. The Container blocks Facebook cookies and impedes communication between Facebook and other sites. You may have trouble using Facebook Login on other sites, but in exchange your privacy will be enhanced.   DISABLE LOCATION SERVICES. By default, Facebook gathers location data and uses it for status updates and photo uploads. You can turn off location services from within the Facebook app or from a phone's own settings. On an iPhone, go to Settings > Privacy > Location Services > Facebook and choose the Never option. Android users can go to Settings > Apps & Notifications > App Permissions > Location Permissions > Facebook, and slide the bar to the Off position.

WHAT YOU CAN DO

USE TWO-FACTOR AUTHENTICATION. Turn it on, and Facebook will require a verification code whenever your account is accessed from an unverified location, computer, browser, or phone. Facebook sends the code to an email or mobile number you've designated, and you need to enter the code, along with your usual login credentials, to gain access to the account. It adds a layer of protection against unauthorized access. To activate this feature using a laptop, go to Facebook's Account Settings menu, select Security and Login, tap "Use two-factor authentication," and click on the Set Up link. MAKE YOURSELF HARDER TO FIND. Using the Who can look me up? section of Facebook's Privacy Settings and Tools menu, you can control who can find you using your email address or phone number, and whether or not search engines can link to your profile. The Privacy Checkup tool will show you what information, such as your email address and birthday, is visible to friends and to the public. CONTROL WHO CAN SEE YOUR POSTS. To do this, use the drop-down menu right next to the Post button. Choices include friends, the public, groups you belong to, and an option to build your own custom list. You can choose specific people to block (i.e. your direct superior in a workplace group you belong to.) This feature is not exclusive to statuses—photo albums can have custom viewer lists, too.

WHAT YOU CAN DO

CHOOSE WHO CAN ADD TO YOUR TIMELINE. Enabling Timeline Review lets you control what’s allowed on your timeline by requiring you to approve each post. Notices asking for you to approve posts appear in the Activity Log portion of your profile page, alongside an overview of your Likes and images you’ve been tagged in. Facebook allows users to add their friends to a group without consent; it's a sometimes problematic feature, as  Mark Zuckerberg once famously experienced. While there is no way to keep this from happening, you can use the Activity Log to see if you have been added to any groups. (You can then permanently remove yourself, if you choose.) STOP YOUR LIKES FROM BECOMING ADVERTISEMENTS. You've probably seen posts reading "So-and-so likes this" with a sponsored link and a Like Page button. While you may like a company or group in the non-Facebook sense, that doesn't mean you want to publicly endorse it. To opt out of this, go to the Ads section of the Settings menu and change the "Ads with my social actions" option to "No one." This area of Settings also allows you to control whether Facebook can target you with ads based on your online activity. CHANGE PASSWORDS AND RECOVERY INFORMATION. askleo.com. tinyurl.com/y7tqbmnd.

WHAT YOU CAN DO

CONCLUSIONS

No real alternative to FB for broad info sharing. Deleting FB account not realistic for most users. Psychographics is extremely dangerous. Once data is out, hard to recover. You have to decide what info you share - privacy. FB will make it easier to limit data sharing/stealing. You have to spend time to learn the system.