TIME HAS ARRIVED TO STARVE INSATIABLE FACEBOOK MACHINE

FACEBOOK has been in the media again for all the wrong reasons.

A researcher, Alex Kogan, built a mobile app to extract the Facebook data of users and their friends. He was able to capture personal details of more than 50 million Facebook users.

The app was funded by the voter-profiling company Cambridge Analytica which used the data it collected to influence voters during the 2016 US election campaign.

It is the largest known leak of personal data from Facebook, but certainly not the first.

The latest incident also follows on from the recent disclosure that Russia had used Facebook extensively to influence public opinion during the same election campaign.

Both of these misuses of Facebook may have contributed to Donald Trump becoming the leader of the free world.

It is easy for us to point a finger at Facebook and say “they should have stopped the data leakage” or “they should have stopped manipulation of voters using fake news”, but in the end it might be better to look at ourselves.

We have voluntarily given Facebook our personal information and continue to do so.

They know where we live, what we look like, where we go on holidays, which news articles we like, what groups we are associated with, and who our friends are.

Our most sensitive personal information and the chronology of our daily lives is sitting somewhere in the Facebook data cloud.

And this is exactly the purpose of Facebook.

The company earns billions of dollars a year charging advertisers a premium to put targeted advertising in front of us.

They have profiling software analysing our data so they can understand us in ways never imagined. It is this sophisticated profiling capability that gives them their competitive value against other advertisers and services.

And we’ve made it so easy. They don’t have to try to collect the information about us, we give it to them willingly on a daily basis.

Now the regulators around the world are sitting up and taking notice. In the UK, EU and US, regulators this week began asking Facebook some hard questions about its data protection policies.

But honestly, isn’t it too little too late?

I would propose instead that the time has come for us to act.

It will not be until Facebook loses significant revenue from advertising that it will take these issues seriously.

We must stop feeding the Facebook engine with our personal data. We must leave the platform. We have to stop using the Facebook apps. We need to stop signing in with Facebook.

It is very unlikely you’ll ever be able to get your personal data removed from Facebook or its partners, but at least you will not be feeding them new personal data they can harvest and profile.

If we all act, we have some chance to stop the evil that is being done by Facebook.