How Facebook's Minions Inform On You When You Go Off-Facebook
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Photo by Thought Catalog on Unsplash
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We have long-established that Facebook, that big mammoth of an organization today knows more about us than we do ourselves. The feat has lost its vanity, it isn't cool anymore. It is not a fact that you clap to when a magician or card-reader reveals something about you that you yourself might have overlooked. You submit voluntarily to them, not so much to Facebook. Facebook today stores far greater information about you than the tidbits you provide to it yourself. And it uses that enormous information to decide what you like, what you might be interested in, what kind of deaths will disturb you more, what news you might be interested to read, what videos pick your interest, which political party you might vote to, are you a fence-sitter, essentially it knows you. You might be confused about what you wish to eat for dinner tonight but I bet Facebook if given a chance will tell you exactly what will interest you at the dinner table. That's not all, we have seen it and read how all this information is also used to manipulate us into voting for certain political parties, to influence our votes and in turn the democracy as a whole. In case, this looks alien to you or superfluous or bombastic, you must watch The Great Hack on Netflix. It will shock your bones to learn how far their surveillance machinery has come, how perilous our life and democracies have become from the new tech whose lengths and reaches in our lives remain unknown to the vast majority. People roam the streets, vent their anger, type their views on online platforms, upload pictures of them smiling on web without knowing what these things are being used for, they are unaware that these data-points are traced and visited over and over again to form a picture of them which is then used to inform on you, and eventually used to influence your actions. You think you are reading a certain article out of your free will, you think you are voting a party out of your choice, you think you are buying a product because you wanted it, let me put it out to you, none of your choices today are originating from your free will. Your free will was long sold when you signed up on "free" platforms. We have long written an obituary of that free will.
Watch the film. Over the years, this and many of the pieces and leaks have made us alert to the danger we are in because our choices no more belong to us, our conversations are no more driven by free will, our arguments, our opinions, our habits, everything is somehow driven and directed by an algorithm coded and funded from billionaire's offices. To some, this might sound a stretch of paranoia but to some, this might just appear very little of what it truly is. So what do we do or what have people who have known this been doing. People like Snowden have been shouting from the roof to move away from Facebook of course, but also to use alternate tech options for our day-to-day communications. How Facebook acquires this information, apart from what we obviously provide, has been a source of mystery and had made people speculate but also encourage them to erase their tracks. The first step in it has been to not use Facebook's app on your phone. That way, your contact lists, messages, location information, the way you use the phone, your phone calls, microphone etc remain out of its bounds. Some of us also moved from Chrome browser (made by other big company Google) and jumped to Firefox which has tremendously improved from its initial days and today is not only secure and private but is also faster than Chrome in most benchmark tests. On top, there are containers for Firefox that keep Facebook sites in a separate container (likewise for Google) so that when you browse Facebook pages, its trackers cannot monitor and read what you do on non-Facebook sites. This way you still use Facebook but you separate your non-Facebook interactions out of its bounds. Logically, you would think this as enough to keep it from sniffing your life but no, somehow, you would find that the hound has sniffed its way into your life. Or more like, the small dogs, which you though as harmless have sniffed and delivered information about your life back to the big one. Wondering what am I talking? Well, this.
Off-Facebook activity includes information that businesses and organisations share with us about your interactions with them, such as visiting their apps or websites.
The worrying part is what all apps and websites it lists there. There are dating apps, travel apps, calendar apps, news websites, literature websites, shopping apps and sites, games, movie booking apps and sites, note-keeping apps, bill payment apps, food ordering sites, fashion websites, all the things that you access on the web, they exist in the list. Your entire life. I'm not even trying to exaggerate, for today, we almost exist on online more than we do outside. A few decades ago, it would have been a nightmare to find out what a man does, where does he go, what does he eat, who does he meet, what does he read or watch, we were all a mystery. No more now. Our life today is merely a click away. It is another thing that only the powerful have access to this information and vice-versa is not true. Your government or a corporation has information on you and your life is a click away for them but you cannot know or access their activities. Imbalance of power has only widened.
Take a deep breath
So all of these apps and sites have been collecting your data, your everyday life, the one that you thought you were cleverly hiding from Facebook and nicely delivering it to the giant. Like a well-prepared meal. I would not know for certain how they managed this given I do not use facebook's app in my phone and in the browser, Firefox, I use container tabs. I don't use Facebook credentials to sign-in into other places. I even have apps and sites in the list where I use ghost mail addresses and those where I don't even log-in. I don't know what to say anymore but just that, we need to be more careful for our lives are in danger. We need to understand that our private lives are ours alone, they are not up for sale in a market to the highest bidder. Our intellect, our attention, our choices, our votes, the streets that we walk on and the foods that we have is not on sale. The repercussions of this data collection, and the kind of scale on which Facebook does it, are huge. Snowden explains this kind of thing far better in his book Permanent Record. He also explains why privacy is important and fundamental to our lives and the health of our democracy. Do read his memoir. I digressed, didn't I? Anyways, that's about it. Inform yourself of your life and also inform yourself of your phone and, the sites and apps you use. Let your phone inform you and not on you.
Sidenote: These are the alternate apps I use for my daily communication. Signal (in place of Whatsapp) for daily communication. I still use Whatsapp for friends who still haven't moved from it but a large part of my conversations take place on Signal which is secure and more private. The only piece of information they save about you is your last online and when you first installed it. That's it. For mails, I use Protonmail, which is an end-to-end encrypted mail service developed by scientists at CERN. It is again secure and private to a point that even they cannot open your mails. So if they ever get leaked or accessed by police, the only information they will get is some garbled data which would make no sense until you, the owner of those mails, opened them. So unlike Gmail, you would never be in dark about who opened your mails and who did not. Then there is Firefox which I already mentioned somewhere above.
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