In the wake of the Cambridge Analytica scandal, there’s a
widespread movement for people to #DeleteFacebook. But even when you go through all the
steps to wipe your account, the odds are high that Facebook still has deep
caches of all your user data, which is can still use. Better than simply
deleting your account is to replace all that data with nonsense, and if you’re
savvy with code, you can do just that.
Kevin Matthew, a
former systems administrator who owns a small web development company, shared a script he created that replaces existing Facebook
posts with randomly-generated nonsense. With a little coding know-how, you
could use this script to repeatedly mangle all your Facebook posts over a
period of several months, to make the bulk of Facebook’s data on you virtually
unusable (though it doesn’t do anything for the data that’s already been
scraped by third-parties, like the kind Cambridge Analytica allegedly gained
access to).
Matthew said his
script is simply a proof of concept, because actually doing this may be in
violation of Facebook’s terms of service (so use at your own risk).
“My background is as
a systems administrator, I’ve been doing that for 20 years, and everyone has
data retention policies and backups,” Matthew told me over the phone.
“Facebook, with its infinite amount of resources, I can only begin to imagine
how that data is being held and retained.”
Matthew’s script
automatically opens Facebook posts to edit and replaced them with
randomly-generated text. The idea is that if you ran the script 100s, or 1000s
of times, over the course of several months, on all of your data, it would
likely make it more difficult for Facebook’s algorithms to pull useful data it
uses to build a profile of you, including your political leanings and sexual
orientation.
“Every little bit of
information contributes to that invisible profile that they’re building of
everyone,” Matthew said. “If we can obfuscate it even a little bit, that at
least puts the power back into your hands as an end user.”
Though so far he’s
only done a proof of concept for posts, going forward Matthew said it would be
possible to build similar scripts to “poison” the rest of your Facebook data,
such as tracking which websites you visit by having a script visit thousands of
random sites while you’re logged into your account. To make it more accessible
for non-coders, it would also be possible to create a desktop-based app that
would run all the scripts for the average user.
We don’t know how far
back Facebook’s history of data on its users extends, how that data is stored
and backed up, but this is one way to at least make an attempt at sticking it
to the platform before you leave it forever.
Matthew told me his
main goal, though, is to raise awareness and to draw attention to the fact that
the US and Canada have virtually no “right to be forgotten” laws, something that
would protect a users right to have their data purged if they want to leave a
site.
“Maybe my script
won’t make a huge impact on a global scale, but maybe it will get us talking
about protecting our privacy,” Matthew said. “If I want my data to be purged, I
should have the right to do that.”
Courtesy: Kaleigh Rogers of MOTHERBOARD.com
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