A bitter harvest after data storm for Facebook
MY favourite TV show right now is The Good Place, where heaven looks like Milton Keynes with sunshine and unlimited frozen yogurt, and if you have any questions, you call on Janet, a cheery, walkingtalking database, with an infinite supply of wisdom and fun facts.
You could spend eternity with Janet, and it turns out you may have to because if you try to delete her, she is programmed to beg for her life. ‘Please don’t hurt me. I have three children,’ she pleads, when a hand hovers over her kill switch. ‘And Tyler has asthma.’
Now, in the wake of Facebook’s data privacy scandal, thousands of users are finding that Facebook is just as reluctant to let go. Press the delete button and it offers you de-activation instead. And if you are firm, and claim you’ve already moved on and met an app you like better, Facebook will cling to your leg, weeping, and insist on a twoweek ‘cooling-off’ period during which it will text you. Every day.
I’VE used MySpace and Twitter, but Facebook is the biggest beast – one in three of us is connected. So it’s certainly disappointing that while doing a Which Sex And The City Character Are You? quiz, Facebook was pumping valuable personal information to Cambridge Analytica. It’s like finding out that posting your top five theme tunes on Twitter meant you were buying gins for Steve Bannon.
Facebook boss Mark Zuckerberg has apologised for allowing the harvesting of the site’s data, but it’s striking that while his gigantic company is worth billions and drives news agendas, somehow all he can promise is to do better.
Despite the GDP of a small country, apparently Facebook can only afford the law enforcement infrastructure of a Venezuelan shanty town. Yet while one side of my brain says that I can’t trust Facebook and it’s time to move on, the other side asks me to hang on and see if FB can redeem itself. I don’t like Facebook right now, but I do like the people on Facebook.
This weekend we commiserated about marking exam papers, sniggered over a picture of a baking disaster, and chummed a pal in hospital with good wishes in numbers that could not have been squeezed around her bed during actual visiting hours.
Besides, without Facebook, will I have to start signing birthday cards again? And I can’t be the only person to whip out my phone on the way to a party, click onto the FB guest list and use it to draw down important pointers like ‘never discuss veganism with X, unprompted’.
But maybe you don’t have to delete Facebook to kill the data. Maybe you could contaminate it instead, by answering survey questions incorrectly, and liking stuff that you don’t like.
Tell them you think Irvine Welsh writes books with fascinating female characters. Click ‘like’ when someone posts a video of them eating a scotch egg on a stormy ferry crossing. But maybe message your friends first.