Silly quizzes on Facebook have been following my life for over 10 years
The news about Cambridge Analytica’s tactics showed how the younger me gave several companies a front-row seat to my life for ten years by playing silly quizzes on Facebook.
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The company Cambridge Analytica collected data on millions of Facebook users and used this info to microtarget them with political campaign ads. It is still unclear how this influenced the 2016 American elections. But it does shine a light on how social media has loopholes that make people’s personal data vulnerable to bad players.
One of Cambridge Analytica’s strategies was to make people sign up for apps, games and quizzes on Facebook to give up their personal data. I grew up with social media and took many silly tests during my teens: ‘What Harry Potter character are you?’, ‘What is the name of your future boyfriend?’, ‘What type of house fits your personality best?’. Once I’d finished it, each quiz offered a funny and flattering reply and urged me to share it with friends and family.
At the time, it was a fun thing to do and I never thought twice about it. Once older, I grew out of it and soon forgot about these quizzes…until two weeks ago, when news broke about Cambridge Analytica’s tactics. Now the U.S.A’s top telecommunications regulator is investigating Cambridge Analytica regarding the American presidential elections of 2016.
A couple of years ago, Cambridge Analytica hired a University of Cambridge professor named Aleksandr Kogan to build a database of ‘psychometric profiles’. These are digital portraits of someone’s knowledge, abilities, attitudes and personality. Then the firm used that knowledge to create very personal political messages to influence people’s voting.
Kogan got this info through Facebook apps. When people signed up for these apps, including games, they gave third-party developers access to a significant amount of their own data. Plus, Facebook’s terms of service at the time allowed developers to request access to an app user’s friends as well.
That’s how Kogan managed to pay only 270,000 Facebook users to install the app, and then gained access to their friends, too. In total Cambridge Analytica accessed 50 million profiles.
One signup ages ago took me barely seconds, but gave several companies a front-row seat to my life for the past ten years.
I was still in high school when I signed up for quizzes and apps on Facebook, around 2013. I didn’t know anything about what it meant to sign up for these apps. I also assumed that if Facebook allowed these developers, they must have checks and rules in place to avoid any abuse of my data. Think again.
It was so uneventful at the time that I soon forgot about it (something developers often count on). So after the news about the illegal data harvest broke last week, I revisited the list of applications connected to my account. It turned out that several of those old quizzes were still harvesting my personal data non-stop.
Facebook made it so easy for developers to get my data, but never helped me to understand what I was giving up in exchange. This disconnect between the power these platforms have, compared to what its users know about them, is just scary.
Plus, many of these companies count on the fact that users won’t bother with changing privacy settings or cleaning up their profiles. They offer a quick, fun and seamless experience for what seems like a simple trade: Just give us access to your all your friends, likes and personal info and you can take the quiz ‘What Sesame Street character are you?’ now.
Zuckering: The act of creating deliberately confusing jargon and user-interfaces which trick your users into sharing more info about themselves than they really want to.” The term was suggested in an Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) article by Tim Jones on Facebook. It is named after Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg.
Is Facebook a company that deliberately wants to do bad things? Probably not. The problem is partly the current belief that growing a business comes with breaking things, but at the same time believing a quick fix or a quick change in the algorithm will always be the solution. But firms like Facebook actually need to dig deeper to the root of the problems to make sure this doesn’t happen again, because people are very much done with the polished crisis communication (satirical version from NY Magazine here).
How can I unlink applications?
Facebook is slow in solving its problems, so I urge anyone who vaguely remembers these tests to go to Facebook and check their own list of applications. (A how-to from Quartz here). They might not all be bad, but there’s nothing to be gained for you to keep the connection live.
Also: this will not delete all data these apps have collected on you. It will only prevent them from collecting more data. If you want all your data to be deleted, Facebook reminds you to contact the developer to ask if your information can be removed. But this means you’ll have to send e-mails for each app you signed up for in your life (with some maybe out of business already) and demand the firm delete your data.
If you have kids, talk to them about this as well. Not only Facebook, but a lot of other social platforms request more access to personal info than needed (often letting users sign up via Facebook).
The Cambridge Analytica scandal also shines a new light on the upcoming General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) in Europe, effective from May 2018. One provision of the new law sets a minimum age for social media. Kids have to be 16, before they are allowed to decide for themselves if they want to be on social media. Kids younger than 16 have to ask their parents for permission. The minimum age can be lowered to 13, if member states decide to do so.
If you are an educator or teacher and you have found a good way to talk to kids and teens about technology, do get in touch!
