A Dead Simple Chrome Browser Extension, To Find Out What Facebook Knows About You!

surpassinggoogle (76)in #privacy • 8 years ago

It is very evident, if you are conversant with the internet and especially, pay attention to the pattern of Ads that appear as we surf the internet; that much of our data, in the form of our browsing behavior is out there for free and we are limited in our control of our information.

If you could collate all these pieces of seeming negligible data, that we serve out for free as we consume resources on the internet, what or how much, would you learn about yourself?

The question above formed the basis for 2 developers, coming together to create the new Chrome extension; called Data Selfie.

Hang Do Thi Duc and Regina Flores Mir, developed this application to give us, internet users a slight insight, into what kind/how much digital footprint we leaving behind, bare, to be usurped as they browse especially, Facebook.

Data Selfie, is to try, to bring some transparency, to the hidden mechanisms applied by Facebook's data collection techniques and algorithms.

How does Data Selfie work?

Data Selfie is basically a new Chrome extension, that creates a personality profile of you, using personality insights from the supercomputer; 'IBM Watson' plus the machine learning algorithm called Apply Magic Sauce; then presents this collation or "data selfie" so to speak, to you for your reading pleasure. So in essence, it tries to tell you, who you are, to you; based on your Facebook usage and behavior!

It builds you a personality profile, based on data collected from your Facebook usage/habits i.e links on Facebook, that you have clicked on, your likes, what you look/hover at and for how long, and what keywords that you type during your Facebook search as well as your interactions in posts and Facebook comments etc.

Data Selfie's source code is on Github, to keep it transparent, and to maintain your privacy, all of the data that it tracks, is stored on your personal computer as the data selfie application is a browser extension.

"Data selfie" represents its different section of information about you, by means of tiles, with each tile related to specific information about your interests e.g your political orientation, religious affiliations, and how you relate with things in the world etc

image source/credit to: fastcodedesign

When you open up the application, you see your activity on the site tagged according to the current date and time, with small, color-coded + symbols, indicating things that you have looked, liked, your clicked-upon links, things that you have typed.

Scrolling down and it starts to show you, your top ten friends as well as, your top ten pages, based on duration spent, engaging with their posts, too; your top likes.

Next, it will reveal two lists; one containing "keywords," that defines general topics in the content you looked at, and and the other list called "entities,"highlighting the people, things and organizations in the content you have spent time looking at.

These lists, try to give a measurement of the relevance of these keywords or entities to you and your positive or negative behavior or sentiments towards them!

Data Selfie then outlines, the relevance of general concepts, ideas, etc apparent or ruling, the content you looked at, then a personality prediction in the form of a chart, is created, showing to you each percentile of 'the Big 5 personality traits: openness, conscientiousness, openness, agreeableness, extraversion and emotional range.

This then measures your probable religious affiliation, political orientation etc solely on the data you release as you react to content you see in your Facebook feed. It also use all the collated data makes other estimates, predictions, measurements, about your general intelligence and leadership abilities.

Data Selfie displays all its predictions based on percentile.

image source/credit to: fastcodesign

Regina Flores Mir experience running Data Selfie for 7 days:

According to Flores, upon using Data Selfie for a week, she found really interesting facts!

In her case, she highlights what results she found, from the information, that the data selfie app provided about her based on her Facebook usage and habits!

She agrees that data selfie, did get some things outrightly right about her as for one, it was able to identify that she relies on the New York Times mostly, as her source for News updates; "Yes, she agrees that while on Facebook, she does spend more time looking at posts from the New York Times, more than any other page!"

Plus, data selfie was able to indicate, her generally negative perception of the United States, of Donald Trump and his proposed Muslim ban, and of Uber.

However, apart from all the findings above, Flores also found some more intriguing results and some this results, not only startled her but started to unsettle her:

In terms of her Big 5 personality traits, the data from data selfie; claimed that she more competitive than trusting and and she is not very team-oriented; too, that she more conservative and traditional as opposed to liberal and artistic; plus, it highlighted, that she's more laid back as opposed to emotional. And Flores, knows that in reality, these traits aren't exactly her, so the question is, why does the data she gives off, as she consumes Facebook, say something different about her.

Yes, this is where it gets interesting!

There was a lack of correspondence in the data-driven personality profile created by the data selfie application and her actual real life perception of herself; in some aspects, which hints a possible discrepancy in online behavior compared to how we act in real life!

This easily became a concern for Flores!

It is very evident, that Facebook definitely uses more sophisticated data mining and tracking algorithms, plus more years of data collation from Flores 7 years of Facebook use, compared to the only one week, that she has spent on using the data selfie application.

To add to this Facebook, actively purchases as much additional data about potential users from third-party data brokers!

If Data Selfie, which is merely a browser extension, can already discern this much information about a user, from 7 days of data, then how much of us, is out there, laid bare; for Facebook to use or at least know?

Trying to comprehend this is unsettling!

For Do Thi Duc, the other developer who joins Flores in creating Data Selfie, all the above is of more concern as she grew up in Germany, where concerns about digital privacy are pretty high!

According to Do Thi Duc, even till date, in Germany, people are apprehensive of the prospect their information or data falling in the wrong hands. She pinpoints, that in general, in Europe, there is a sense, that they don't know what will indeed happen if their information falls in the wrong hands, as there as not been very many cases of dangerous events etc, in the past!

The pertinent question now becomes about:

"What exactly and just how much does Facebook, actually knows about me?"

Data Selfie, is definitely not out, to be 100 percent accurate but it does give insight, into how data collection works and too, the fact, that data-driven personality conclusions, can't be 100 percent accurate, can be unsettling a bit!

Data selfie only provides a tip of the iceberg of information about you, that is laid bare for free, out there, yet this tiny data, does already have a measure of accuracy, about who you are!

So What Does Facebook Know About You?

Flores Mir continues; about her short experience with data selfie; it did have a measure of effect on her. It made her re-think about her identity as she tries to tally it, to results from data selfie!

In one conclusion, provided by data selfie, it had said, that she is likely not to be concerned about the environment, yet even though, yet, even though she knew, that this wasn't actually true in her real life; it did make her thinkabout her online behavior and what variety of her personality is presented online.

Overall, the knowledge, that you probably have a lack of control over your information as shown even minutely by Data Selfie, is deeply disturbing and gives us a feeling of helplessness and nakedness online; because in reality, it is evident that we can't escape the undilutable feeling that Facebook, has such a large amount of data, that you have no control over!

After a year working with and analyzing Data Selfie, Flores is more aware of her need for privacy and has reduced her use of Facebook and Google, and has experimented with different browsers and VPN to improve on her privacy while online. I don't know if she has heard of Steemit or social media platform built on the steem blockchain, where no ads are served and where privacy is key; just yet, but she likely will and so will the increasing populace of netizens, to whom privacy online is becoming ever utmost!

With Donald Trump, currently in power in USA, Americans are becoming more conscious of their privacy, especially online thus, the need for privacy is now ever pressing!

According to an article published after the election; a big data-company collated personality profiles based by people's usage/activity on Facebook and pinpointly targeted them with pro-Trump ads!

Based on the above, it is impossible to fully rule out, that your data, may even have been used to sell you, a presidential candidate! Your votes for either Hillary Clinton or Donald Trump, for instance, can easily and obliviously, have been influenced.

This is a big deal!

Data Selfie started as a fun way to give people insight into, the difference of their social media habits and their real life behavior or values, but after all, it uncovers important questions about data-tracking, data-mining, privacy and to further highlight out limited control, over our information.

Data Selfie, may further help us understand the pros of Steemit and improve our conviction about this wonderful platform and give us another dimension, from which we can help potential steemians, see the need to join Steemit in 2017.

Additional source/credit to:

https://www.fastcodesign.com/3067850/how-snapchat-could-bring-back-tvs-golden-age