Facebook collecting people's data even when accounts are deactivated
digiday.com
digiday.com
I've never had a FB account, but some years ago I got an email from FB listing a number of my friends and family and saying, "All these people have FB accounts. Wouldn't you like to join FB?"
The email included a reply option labeled "don't contact me again," which I chose and then replied. But a few months later I got the same invitation.
Needless to say, I found that to be deeply disturbing, and it confirmed my determination to never subscribe to FB. Later I learned about the phantom accounts. I'm sure FB maintains a dossier on me to this day.
I'm curious how it got your email -- and decided to use it. I have several publicly visible emails, and they've received plenty of spam, but none from FB like that.
I also know that one of my so-called "friends" posted a group picture with me in it, and labeled the people in the picture. At one point I did a search to see what information was out there about myself, and that picture popped up associated with my name.
I guess that I'm just another casualty of the information age, in spite of my best efforts.
But with ML facial recognition I figure the jig is up.
In general, AI that's hawked at CEO types and police is mostly snake oil, inferior to what you can make yourself if you read hackernews and are willing to dive into Arxiv.
Not sure how much of that has changed since then. But contact data is by far the most valuable mined from phones. Facebook is no exception.
I know it suggested my ex-girlfriend as a connection when I opened my account, five years after we'd last talked.
There's a lot of data flowing around out there, and people overwhelmingly willingly hand it over. You'd think that there would be a law that, having collected that data, they would be required to hold it in confidence - Not for you, but as an agent of the friend who gave them that data. And there likely is, but good luck getting it enforced.
This is basically how LinkedIn grew their network - read your addressbook, put a "invite everyone you know" button in the on-boarding slideshow. Facebook just does the extra work of noticing your email in other people's address books, so they can tell you who your friends will be before you even sign up.
[1] https://about.fb.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/4/2018/06/fina...
Pardon my skepticism if your only source of truth is "Facebook told regulators".
And surely they'd never mislead anybody regarding what data they keep.
Which admittedly makes it a bit hard to explain how, despite having completely deleted my account several years ago (yes, not just deactivated, I went through all the little guilt-trip pleas not to delete), they managed to accidentally (a bug, presumably) send me a Friend Suggestion email several weeks ago (suggesting someone I actually do know, no less) considering that by their own words they should have wiped both that email address and the social graph associated with it several years earlier...
Oh, you mean the account that you confirmed as deleted 8+ years ago??
Facebook doesn't delete shit. If you work at Facebook, you need to evaluate the ethical course of your life and career and reconsider the choices that led you to this place. There are other employers that pay almost as well and that don't treat 1984 like a mission statement.
There's still a list of names and a bunch of data. No question.
All that clicking that link told Facebook is that you're a real person who reads their emails. It's like when you pick up the phone for a telemarketer, now they know they can continue bothering you because you're a real person and you answer your phone.
Tech companies prey on people's sense of good faith.
Expect to be asked to provide more "factors" in the future.
The few times a telemarketer reaches through to me on one of my phones, I've put them off by asking in a niche foreign language in that nation whether they speak that language. Most of the time, they immediately hang up and I never hear from them again. Sometimes, they repeat their script, then hang up. I've never had someone respond in that language (that would be a blast to address).
I would lay money that Facebook just uses that unsubscribe as another data point.
Guess who gets "smart matches" spam in Chinese.
I almost read that as FBI dossier. Similar idea, though presumably for advertising purposes.
It works, too, the ads I get are so wildly irrelevant it’s comical.
TikTok's biggest short term threat is probably the CCP, which has been increasingly taking a hardline approach w/ their own tech companies (think Ant Financial, JD etc).
The CCP is taking a hardline with companies domestically. There's a huge push to stop corrupting the youth, treat data responsibly, etc.
The CCP gives 0 shits what those companies do to the rest of the world, and are probably thrilled if TikTok causes political and social chaos in the US.
Exactly, w/ 72% of their users being domestic[1], TikTok's biggest short term threat is probably the CCP.
>> The CCP gives 0 shits what those companies do to the rest of the world, and are probably thrilled if TikTok causes political and social chaos in the US.
You're not wrong.
[1] https://www.statista.com/chart/25867/percentage-of-tiktok-us...
In the case of FB, the US government would get that data. In the case of TikTok, it's the Chinese government who would get the data on you, the US citizen.
Objectively speaking, it would be strictly worse if lots of data on US citizens would end up in the hands of the Chinese government, because it's a foreign government and, as we know, information is power. Data on one person is not that useful, data on millions of US citizens, even when noisy, can be extremely powerful.
We also know at this point that a feature like News Feed can be trivially used to influence what information people see and how that information is presented, which then influences the people's opinion of matters in the world, even if the information is delivered via a fun, engaging or funny medium, it's still being absorbed by the brain and the end result is the same: successful control of the information dispersed to the masses.
It's one thing for the US government to influence its citizens opinion (all governments do this for various reasons, for example to cultivate feelings of patriotism and national pride), and it's a completely different ball game if the Chinese government can influence what US citizens think of certain matters. For example, they can try to sway the public opinion towards a political candidate that is more favorable for the foreign government, thereby meddling in a foreign election, only this time it's done with a ton of plausible deniability and the foreign citizens themselves are helping out.
This doesn't mean that Facebook is good, just that it is the lesser of two evils, and, in my opinion, it's a strategic mistake on the US's part to allow TikTok to be used en masse by US citizens. I would have banned it a long time ago.
You could also replace US and China with any other two states that can control what information billions of people see on a daily basis and I would argue the same point.
They're not your enemy _now_ and yes they can affect your life. You seem to be thinking about it as if someone in the CCP will wake up one day and decide to do something about "ok_dad". You're not alone in the country, right? There are other people that influence your life. While you may not be directly targeted, you can be indirectly affected by their ability to influence _other people around you_.
And when it comes to data, individual data is not that useful, it's aggregate data that's useful, which is why we _collectively_ have to prevent this from happening. For example, you don't have to give me your phone number, it's sufficient that your friend who called you gives me access to his contact list.
> The USA gov might be someday.
Two things can be bad at the same time. You could be enabling a foreign country to affect your life, and you could be targeted by the US government.
If we're talking about people who don't have accounts or don't view Facebook (which presumably people with deactivated accounts don't), then they're not looking at the News Feed (or whatever the TikTok equivalent is) and can't be influenced that way.
And practically speaking, there's very little China can do to an "average" American citizen based on browsing habits and stuff like that. Now if a person ever goes to China, then I agree they'd have a problem, but most Americans don't.
Meanwhile, there are plenty of ways for the US government to (legally) use the data Facebook has collected against its citizens.
And you can't even claim it's inaccessible and hidden away in Google and Facebook data centers, because there's no transparency into who has access to it, so we really don't know.
I'm certain LinkedIn was doing it as well, ie. dark patterns to upload contact list then aggressively harvesting new users.
Yea, maybe a few businesses would fail, maybe some people would lose contact with old friends. But if fb is the only way you keep in contact with someone, do you really care about them?
Cost benefit analysis is easy to do, actually pulling the trigger is hard.
I'll push the damn button, no problem. Just show me where it is. However, I'm guessing it's harder to find and is actually split into 7 horrocruxes.
Now, all the people in a position to do so are chained by perverse incentives to keep the whole shit show going.
That said, it is relevant that they only do this for "deactivated" accounts, and not "deleted" accounts. To give them the benefit of the doubt, those states are different, and if they communicated what they meant by each state, it would be fine with me if they continued tracking people until they actually deleted their accounts.
The problem is that they don't communicate it very well — they didn't back in 2008, and it sounds like they don't do it much better today. That's the sneaky part, not the tracking itself. Well, the tracking is sneaky, don't get me wrong, but if you're on Facebook in 2022, you must know about it and have accepted at some level that it is happening.
I also remember actually getting them to delete my account for good was not trivial. There was a waiting period, and a lot of different ways to accidentally opt out. To be honest, I initially read this article thinking it had been discovered that they were tracking "deleted" users in addition to "deactivated" users this whole time, and it didn't surprise me at all.
I know ZuckFuckerberg is a scumbag, but is he really going to break the law?
/s
For example EBay sent an email to me (IP/DMARK/DKIM verified) that they had received the payment and were holding it for 'security reasons' and my account would be penalised if not shipped on time. A week later they sent an email saying that they have suspended the buyer for fraud and that I should contact the shipping company to have the item returned (was already delivered at that time). When contacting them (after 50 bot replies) they just denied sending anything (and that their signatures were spoofed), removed any info of the auction from my account, said their TOS exempts them from any damages, and told me not to contact them again.
Not going through a drawn out lawsuit over $150 where my only proof is crypto signatures as all info on my account was wiped..
Facebook claims that the data they have on people cannot be understood by the average person, and because the GDPR requirements state that data needs to be given in an easily understood format, giving this data would violate the law. So they refuse to give it.
This was after months of simply ignoring the requests.
Seriously.
Wow, impressively scummy!
From the Facebook SDK that is embedded on nearly every app that's constantly phoning home, to the largest social media apps, they hoard so much data. If GDPR doesn't unfaze them, I don't know what regulation will.
[1] https://www.businessinsider.com/facebook-employees-are-more-...
Names of your friends and timestamps of when you added them. That's all. This is just so ridiculously useless for anything but compliance.
Besides that, there are no user/group/post/whatever IDs anywhere. Everyone and everything is referred to by names and names only. It's hilarious.
Facebook collects much, much more information about you that doesn't show up in their takeout system's output.
What you describe is a feature of the US economy.