Facebook is facing what it describes internally as a “tsunami” of privacy regulations all over the world, which will force the company to dramatically change how it deals with users’ personal data. And the “fundamental” problem, the company admits, is that Facebook has no idea where all of its user data goes, or what it’s doing with it, according to a leaked internal document obtained by Motherboard.
“We’ve built systems with open borders. The result of these open systems and open culture is well described with an analogy: Imagine you hold a bottle of ink in your hand. This bottle of ink is a mixture of all kinds of user data (3PD, 1PD, SCD, Europe, etc.) You pour that ink into a lake of water (our open data systems; our open culture) … and it flows … everywhere,” the document read. “How do you put that ink back in the bottle? How do you organize it again, such that it only flows to the allowed places in the lake?”
My opinion is it should actually be quite simple… you protect your users’ private info (profiles, private posts, metadata) and you don’t sell or give it away. If you do want to give away for whatever reason, or sell it, a user has to specifically opt in. Other networks like Mastodon, PixelFed, and many more seem to have got it right, and they don’t have thousands of employees to manage it. The problem is Facebook got into the business of making money out of users’ data, and now with the pressure coming on, is finding it difficult to put controls in place. So switch it off and don’t share the data…
#technology #privacy #facebook #meta