Why should I care about Facebook Privacy?

MANILA, Philippines — Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s testimony before the US Senate on April 4 and 5 drew global attention and brought on a global media frenzy, and understandably so. The social media behemoth has 2.2 billion users globally, more than half of the world’s 4 billion Internet users and nearly three-fourths of the world’s 3.1 billion active social media users.

The landmark hearing on Capitol Hill was investigating serious issues: data privacy, consumer protection, use and abuse of people’s information for political targeting.

As Sen. John Thune, chairman of the commerce committee, said, the incident that prompted the investigation was a quiz app used by approximately 300,000 people that led to information about 87 million Facebook users being obtained by a company and used for political targeting.

“And it is not likely an isolated incident,” he said.

But why should the Philippines care about issues half a world away, mainly about malicious actors getting hold of private data to interfere in elections or spread propaganda? Why should we pay attention to this legislative inquiry that mirrors very much our own botched Senate hearings?

A few days before Zuckerberg’s testimony, Facebook released an update on its plans to restrict data access on Facebook. Here they also disclosed that private data of up to 87 million people (mostly in the US) may have been improperly shared with Cambridge Analytica, a British political consulting firm related to the Trump campaign.

The fact is, the Philippines is the second most affected country – after the US – of the data breach. According to Facebook’s data, 1.17 million users from the Philippines (1.4 percent of the total) may have been affected.

Though a very small percentage of the total, it is still significant considering that the social media giant has 67 million users here, according to We Are Social’s Digital 2018 Report.

The Philippines is actually the sixth in Facebook’s top countries and cities, and the average time Filipinos spent on social media at 3 hours 57 minutes is the highest in the world. The US actually trails behind at 2 hours 10 minutes.

This now leads to the question: What does Facebook know about you that may be shared with its partners, app developers or (hopefully not) an unauthorized third party with malicious intent that may be used for commercial or political profiling?

Technically speaking, possibly everything that you share on Facebook – photos, videos you posted yourself or you’ve been tagged with, your locations (places you’ve been to, who you were with and when), your rants, your angst, your messages and conversations with friends, the files you’ve shared with them.

That is if you just clicked the user agreement and privacy policy that the system asked you to agree with when you opened the account and never bothered to take an interest in learning the privacy settings so you may take some posts or details of your life more private or limit them only to certain groups of people.

The web offers a lot of tutorials on how you can download the entire data trove that Facebook has on you. For your peace of mind, take the initiative.

Here’s what mine looks like: a lot of audio files of my children in violin class or practice, a lot of ballet studio photos and videos, a whole collection of photos of me traipsing the globe, mostly in the US where I used to travel a lot for work. There were many photos and snippets of conversations in various family lunches, friend reunions. There’s also the books that I’ve read and shared with friends, transcript of night-long conversations. In short, my entire life’s recent history.  

What’s the issue here if I shared it publicly? That’s basically the problem. We do not usually see the harm in sharing details of our life that we want to make public anyway. But these data, when aggregated per country or per region, can also be used (as they say in the hearings) by “malicious actors” for social engineering.

At the hearing, a Senator asked: “How do you sustain a business model in which users don’t pay for your service?”

Zuckerberg blinked twice before he answered: “Senator, we run ads.”

Lights, camera, laughter! This is the bigger problem, the senator and most people do not understand that collecting people’s information is central to the Facebook business model and that its system runs with algorithmic efficiency.

Based on the data that you share when you opened the account – your age, gender, location, interests, along with the nature of your posts, the friends you have and the websites you visit, among other metrics – they can serve ads personally targeted.

This means that the ads you see on your Facebook account are not the same as what your neighbor, your friends, your siblings or your parents see.

Is there a way out of this mess? If you are counting on the US legislature to work on some form of regulation, it may not be forthcoming just yet. As the viral videos on YouTube eloquently display, many senators on the panel clearly have no idea how social media works.

“If I am emailing within WhatsApp, does it inform your advertisers?” another senator asked.

“No, we don’t see the content on WhatsApp, it’s fully encrypted,” answered Zuckerberg. Now, the average 10-year-old knows that you don’t email on WhatsApp and you don’t get ads based on what you have been messaging people.

“My son Charlie, who is 13, has a dedicated Instagram (a Facebook company). So he wants to make sure I mention him while I was here with you,” said another, before he asked a question.

The fact is, we are all starstruck. It may be about the company whose influence spans the globe or its 33-year-old CEO who reportedly has a net worth of $60 billion. But at the end of the day, what Zuckerberg said is true (though not everybody will agree with it): privacy is completely in the users’ control – if we only take the time to educate ourselves on what we are getting into every time we hit “share” or “post” on social media.

Online or offline, there is no such thing as a free lunch. To borrow a phrase popularized years ago in a controversial local Senate hearing, it may be wise to “moderate our greed” (for personal publicity) or at least to know where it can lead us.