Take The Control Back From Facebook
In recent weeks Facebook has been getting a lot of attention about lack of privacy and using yours and mine information without our permission and even lying about it as well.
Things continue to get worse for the 800 lb gorilla in the room. According to the New York Times, employees were furious over a leaked 2016 memo from Andrew "Boz" Bosworth top executive justifying the way the company collects user information and its methods of growth by any means necessary approach. A former Facebook employee, Alex Muffett, wrote on Twitter that Bosworth's memo was a "significant" part of his decision to leave the company.
The title of this post implies you are furious as well. Facebook said your information was private, Facebook said they would share your information, but they did. However, think about it, Facebook is a public company that trades on the NASDAQ. There interests is making money for their shareholders. Thus, there exist a conflict of interests... protect your information or sell your information so you can be laser targeted by ads. Facebook has been at the epic center of advertisement not only moving online, but to the mobile device since going public in 2014. Their success wouldn't have been possible without selling your information as the three charts indicate below.
And they have been handsomely rewarded as a result of selling your information.
We live in a hyper-information age where, for example, if I went to the bathroom to "drop some friends off at the pool", my mother knows about it via Facebook. However, history is still being written and although you can't change what happened in the past, you can determine how the story ends...BY PROTECTING WHAT'S YOURS...YOUR INFORMATION. The first step is knowing what info Facebook and other know about you.
On desktop or in the mobile app, tap the drop-down menu on the top-right side of Facebook and select "Settings."
Select the "Download a copy of your facebook data".
NOTE: Your activity log is a history of your activity on Facebook, but downloading your info will give you a lot more info. This includes a lot of the same information available to you in your account and activity log, including your Timeline info, posts you have shared, messages, photos and more. Additionally, it includes information that is not available simply by logging into your account, like the ads you clicked on, etc.
On desktop or in the mobile app, tap the drop-down menu on the top-right side of Facebook and select "Settings."
Select the "Apps" option. This is on the left side of the page on desktop. On mobile, simply scroll down the settings page.
This will show you all the apps that have access to the aforementioned data.
To delete an app, select it and tap the "X" button in the right corner, then select remove.
NOTE: Unfortunately, any data that you've previously shared will still be obtained by the app, but it won't get any new data on you.
*Go to http://takeout.google.com/settings/takeout
*Select the products that you want to back up...if you select none, it will turn to select everything.
*Click 'Next' at the bottom of the page.
*Choose the file format - you can pick a .ZIP file and choose a maximum size. I recommend going with the full 50GB file to avoid having your data split into multiple files. If you choose 2GB and have a lot of information on Google, for example, you're going to have a lot of ZIP files. Choose 2GB if you're on an older computer, since ZIP files larger than 2GB require newer operating systems.
*Choose your delivery method. You can get a link via email or have the archive sent to Dropbox, Google Drive or Microsoft OneDrive.
*Tap "Create Archive."
*Be patient. Google warns the archive may take hours or days to create. It took about 20 hours for me — and I then had about 148GB of content to sort through, which is a lot
The beauty of all this is you still have the ability to determine if Facebook and others will continue to be successful. Their success rest on your laurels.
Be a part of history being written by being not being a player or spectator, but being an OWNER.
