A lot of people get frustrated with Facebook or more generally its parent company, Meta. The social media behemoth is literally siphoning all of your personal data every time you interact with their sites- Facebook, Instagram, Whatsapp, Threads and so on. They sell that data to advertisers of all sorts who then assault your senses with ads intended to break your will.
It isn’t just about products. In fact, much if not most of the advertising these days is about ideas- selling political positions including anger, hatred, and bigotry as if we need more of that kind of thing. This isn’t entirely about politics either: in some cases it is just about shifting public perception of right versus wrong in a way that weakens our immune system towards ideas that might have once been considered toxic.
What Facebook advertising influences isn’t just on Facebook. The data they collect and sell influences what you see on other sites as well. You might be identified as middle-aged, overweight, male, and angry. A site oriented towards those traits might become more likely to appear in your search results even when away from Meta’s domains. You could also be seeing different content on the sites themselves targeted at your particular characteristics, navigating you towards more and more ‘engaging’ (i.e.: aggravating) content to hold your attention just a little bit longer.
The question is: how can we get away from Facebook’s control over what we see and how we see it? The answer is more convoluted and largely improbable to implement for a normal user despite a handy guide from the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF).
Getting off of Facebook
As described by the EFF, disconnecting from Facebook is not a simple matter of cancelling your Facebook account. To stop them from collecting data used for advertising involves changing several hard to find account settings on your user profile on Facebook itself. It also requires installing a utility browser extension such as Privacy Badger to prevent trackers such as hidden pixels in third party sites from being used to feed tracking data back to Facebook. You may also want to take additional steps on your mobile device to turn off location data and similar settings.
It is a lot to ask of a normal user to complete even a couple of these steps, let alone all of them. And there is no doubt in my mind that Facebook would still retain some mechanism to track activity even if all of these actions are completed correctly. Read the EFF article, though: it is educational.
What needs to happen is a change in the laws to establish a presumption of privacy first. Simply signing in to Facebook shouldn’t default to them having access to all of my browsing history or, as in the cases identified by the EFF, access to data on the screen such as private medical information in hospitals. The law should make such things chargeable violations with sufficient legal and financial implications to make Facebook hesitate before circumventing them.
The header image for this post is AI generated using ChatGPT