Why Facebook Privacy is a matter of concern to you

It is just a few days when Mr. Mark Zuckerberg, CEO of Facebook, appeared before Congress to be grilled over the Cambridge Analytical data scandal. During two appearances, lasting around 10 hours overall, he faced questions on everything from Russian bots to data collection by the firm. During these appearances, he also had to look vaguely human, something that Twitter seems to think he might have failed on. People took to twitter to pour all manner of jokes without mercy. Unfortunately for Mark, he had to do all this while being watched by millions of people on the Internet, which isn't the easiest of tasks, and on the whole the Internet has been less than kind to him.


With more 2.2 billion monthly active users, Facebook has a stockpiled personal data on nearly one-third of the world's population - a database that is the core of Facebook's $40.65 billion business. Now while most people may not be aware or have not been concerned of the privacy issues that made Mark to be grilled by the congress and more government want to grill him, it is very essential that all of us take time to know the underlying issues.

In this article the question that we will try to answer here is: What Facebook knows about you? The following key issues are very critical to users privacy:
  1. What users submit
  2. Likes.
  3. Location tracking.
  4. Online purchases
  5. Offline purchases.
  6. Metadata.
  7. People you may know. 
  8. Shadow profiles.
  9. Predictions
1. What users submit - users's profile includes name, date of birth, email address, location, job title, education history, relatives and friends are just some of the information that

2. Likes - Facebook's algorithms use 98 data points to predict highly sensitive personal attributes - ethnicity, gender, relationship status, political affiliation

 
3. Location tracking
- Facebook  knows where its users are, where they go, work, eat,  shop, hotels and bars visited. Location-based social media surveillance has been used by law-enforcement agencies.
 

 4. Online purchases Users' clicks on advertisements are tracked. Facebook's cookies - embedded on third-party sites are then used track both users and non-members.

5. Offline purchases - not many people know that Facebook buys data from third-party data brokers who monitor credit card spending. Pixels analytics tool tracks users after they log off from the Facebook site.

6. Metadata - Facebook harvests data from each and every text message a user sends or receives, including deleted texts! This data ranges from words, links, images, videos, locations and even the device used to access the Facebook site.

 7. "People you may know" - At least at some point in time you have seen Facebook prompting you to upload your address books. If you did so then you are among the users whom Facebook encouraged to upload their entire address books to PYMK (People You May Know) . Facebook uses this data to create shadow profiles.

8. Shadow profiles - There exist a large number of dossiers of non-Facebook-user data complied from contact list that their friends, and friends of friends, have been uploaded on to PYMK. Profiles can also contain facial recognition  data from photos and videos.

9. Predictions - After collecting your personal data from various sources on Facebook it is possible for Facebook to use your data to predict future activity. Algorithm-data points include "users who are heavy buyers of beer, wine or spirits ... pain relief products, and over-the-counter medications"


It is for those reasons and others not mentioned here that it is hard to get privacy these days. It is like being confronted by more that a hundred camera men all at the same time to take a photo of you.

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