So there I was at my boyfriend’s house in London several months ago. My PC laptop sat on the kitchen table, with Facebook open in Chrome, while we were having a few conversations about a good friend of his who had just been diagnosed with prostate cancer and was feeling pretty devastated. The man was a keen supporter of West Ham United football team, based in the East End of London. I don’t give a damn about soccer, but my boyfriend and I talked about how great it was that the team was winning matches because it would cheer his friend up. I have never done any online searches about West Ham United and have no Facebook community with whom I would have discussed the team. My boyfriend doesn’t even have a Facebook account. When I opened Facebook again, I was shocked to see that the top trending news story on the top right of the screen was about West Ham. I had encountered Facebook tailoring the news to my browsing history, but there was no way the appearance of this story could have come from anything other than my private, offline conversations. Creeped out, I cleared all my Chrome cookies and from that point on began to use Facebook only on a different browser, Firefox, without any other tabs open at the same time. Once I had finished my work on Facebook, I would log out and close the browser. I was glad to see that the trending stories on my Facebook page became very standard and no longer had anything to do with my personal life.
It wasn’t the first I’d heard about such eavesdropping. My son told me about an experiment in California he and a friend of his carried out a couple of years ago, both of whom had Facebook Messenger on their phones. He claimed they deliberately held a conversation near the devices discussing a particular model of washing machine. Lo and behold, ads for it appeared on their Facebook pages. I was skeptical. Maybe they were exaggerating. Maybe one of them had written about the experiment on Facebook, or told another friend about it who posted it on Facebook. It didn’t have much relevance to me. I had never used Facebook Messenger and didn’t even have Facebook on my phone.
I have to admit that I’m biased against Facebook and only use it to be able to connect to groups related to my work. For a long time I was proud to have no Facebook friends although recently I had to friend one lady in order to join her group. My real friends are flesh and blood ones and I would never use Facebook for anything connected to my personal life. I joined Facebook after Arianna Huffington invited me to become a contributor to Huffington Post. Without a Facebook account, I could neither reply to any comments on my articles, nor comment on other Huff Post articles. So I set up a Facebook profile with minimal personal data and Googled how to change all the defaults to make my account as private as possible. I only set it up on one PC laptop and no other devices.
Yes, I understand that, particularly if you live far away from friends and family, Facebook enables you to stay connected and see what people you care about are doing. But, as the Guardian reported in May 2017, studies are showing the ugly side of social networking. Especially among the young, it can seriously damage mental health, increasing feelings of anxiety and inadequacy. Facebook posts are usually all smiles and superlatives, where people brag about their accomplishments and the amazing experiences they have had. Loads of selfies in fabulous locations with gorgeous companions. You can’t compete with it all. Your life will never be as wonderful as the cherry-picked and highly edited version of other Facebook users’ lives that appear in their posts. You are unlikely to see pictures of people in bed looking miserable, consoling themselves by watching TV and stuffing themselves with tubs of ice cream. If you do post anything, you’ve entered a popularity contest, competing for likes and comments.
Facebook is currently embroiled in a data breach scandal that took a whistleblower to hit the news. By late 2015, Facebook knew that the British political consulting firm, Cambridge Analytica, had been harvesting Facebook user information on an unprecedented scale, yet did virtually nothing about it. Christopher Wylie, who worked with a Cambridge University academic to obtain the data, revealed the story to the British authorities in January 2018. Facebook responded by immediately strengthening users’ data security, making privacy a default and giving users more control of and information about who can access their data. Sorry, I got that wrong. What the company actually did, as reported by David Meyer in Fortune.com on March 19, 2018, was to suspend Wylie’s Facebook, Instagram and What’s App accounts. Sadly, all three sites are currently owned by Facebook. What’s App later denied that it had suspended Wylie’s account.
When the scandal hit the press, Mark Zuckerberg, Founder and CEO of Facebook stayed silent for almost two weeks. Then, on Sunday March 25, 2018, he took out a full-page ad in several national newspapers in the USA and Britain, with the headline, “We have a responsibility to protect your information. If we can’t, we don’t deserve it.” I couldn’t agree more. Zuckerberg ends his personal letter to the world with, “Thank you for believing in this community. I promise to do better for you.” I might have believed that statement if he had added, “only if forced to do so by government regulation.”
In the aftermath of the scandal, Zuckerberg has had to answer questions at Congressional Hearings. So was Facebook really snooping on my conversations at the dinner table? “Yes or no, does Facebook use audio obtained from mobile devices to enrich personal information about users?” asked Sen. Gary Peters (D-MI) at a Senate Hearing on April 10, 2018. “No,” was Zuckerberg’s predictable response. “Hopefully that will dispel a lot of what I’ve been hearing,” said the senator, who had heard this apparent conspiracy theory from many people, including his staffers. Peters accepted Zuckerberg’s answer and moved on to the next point he wanted to raise. Each senator had only five minutes to question him, and Zuckerberg did a great job spouting platitudes to pad out the time and avoid being prodded to answer in more depth.
My question about the scandal is this: Why is anyone surprised by Facebook misusing the personal data of its users and trying to exploit the crap out of them? Mark Zuckerberg has never been a champion of personal privacy, as Facebook’s shady history demonstrates only too well. It originated from Facemash —an internal website Zuckerberg created in 2003 while studying at Harvard. Visitors to the site could rate the hotness of female students from photos Zuckerberg had stolen by hacking into college databases. While he was writing the software he blogged, “I almost want to put some of these faces next to pictures of some farm animals and have people vote on which is more attractive.” Facemash was shut down some days later by the Harvard administration, who charged him with breach of security, violating copyrights, and violating individual privacy. Zuckerberg faced expulsion, but the charges were eventually dropped. Ironically, Facebook’s recently-announced plans to launch a dating service to rival Tinder brings the company closer to its Facemash roots.
Perhaps these days it is unreasonable to have any expectation of privacy online, particularly when companies are providing services at no charge. They’ll always be looking for ways to profit from the data you provide. Google has your browsing history, email, contacts list, calendar and location details, and can use that information to target ads at you. Its voice recognition software is increasingly accurate at transcribing your voicemail and texts you record to send out. Samsung knows all about you from your smart phone and your smart TV. If you have a PC, an Office 365 subscription and/or use Skype, you’re giving Microsoft a lot of personal data. LinkedIn grabs data from your contacts, other people’s contacts lists that include you, your browsing history and most likely a lot more. I have never shared a contacts list with LinkedIn, but it still manages to compile creepily personal “people you might know” lists. With Amazon’s Alexa, you pay for equipment to listen to everything you say. Apple products are seen as better options in terms of privacy and security, but they are also overpriced, and if you use Facebook on an iPhone rather than an android device, your privacy is equally compromised. Apple’s Siri, Amazon’s Alexa, Google Assistant and Microsoft’s Cortana are digital tools that listen if you don’t change your settings, but at least those settings are available for you to be able to change. Facebook’s spying, data mining, and cavalier attitude to data breaches seems much more sinister to me. Despite Zuckerberg’s denials, I strongly believe that the company is routinely not only following your activity online, but also listening to your offline conversations.
George Orwell was right. Big Brother is most definitely here and you can assume that everything you do online is tracked and whatever you say near any device with a microphone is listened to and filed. As Alexandra Ma recently reported in the Independent, the authorities in China have begun using a mandatory social credit system to rate all their citizens according to their online activity. A poor score could ban you from flying or using trains, deny you job opportunities and your kids places in good schools, and have you publicly shamed as a bad citizen. However, in 2018 rather than 1984, the villains aren’t only governments, they’re also Mark Zuckerberg and his friends.