Agree to Facebook’s Terms or Don’t Use It

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From The Wall Street Journal:

A pizza shop needs your address to deliver your pizza. A chat app service needs your selfie if you want to send it to friends. But do internet giants like Facebook and Google really need a list of websites you recently visited?

A battle is looming in Europe over what information Facebook Inc., Alphabet Inc.’s Google and other companies can demand from you. It boils down to what they really need to know—a debate that could end up in courts for years with the potential to weaken either the European Union’s new data-privacy law or the business models of ad-reliant giants like Facebook and Google.

The EU’s new privacy law, which goes into effect on May 25, forbids companies from forcing users to turn over personal information as a condition of using their services. Does that mean you can simply say, “No, thanks,” to any data collection and still use Facebook? Not exactly.

. . . .

There are many exceptions in which companies can still collect data, such as when that information is necessary to fulfill a contract with you. That has set the stage in Europe for a battle over what is truly necessary, and when consent is “freely given,” regulators and privacy lawyers say.

“The crux of this argument is going to be the legitimacy of the behavioral advertising business model,” said Omer Tene, vice president and chief knowledge officer for the International Association of Privacy Professionals. “Behavioral advertising” is the name for the business, worth tens of billions of dollars a year, that allows companies to show users targeted advertising based on their internet activity.

In recent weeks, Facebook has continued work to comply with the new law—called the General Data Protection Regulation, or GDPR—in part by asking users in the EU to opt in to being shown targeted advertising using data gathered from their activity, such as web browsing or purchasing information. But when it comes to authorizing Facebook to collect that data, the company now gives users a stark choice: agree to its new terms of service or delete their accounts.

“If you don’t accept these, you can’t continue to use Facebook,” a pop-up says of the company’s terms and conditions.

Facebook says the data it collects is necessary to fulfill its contract with users to provide “a personalized experience.” The company says it offers prominent options to control how that data is used, but that as a data-driven business, it needs to collect information about its users to function.

“There are certain elements of the service which are core to providing it and which people can’t opt out of entirely, like ads,” said Stephen Deadman, Facebook’s global deputy chief privacy officer. “There’s no point in buying a car and then saying you want it without the wheels. You can choose different kinds of wheels, but you need wheels.”

. . . .

Google, for its part, issued a new privacy policy on Friday that outlines how the company collects data about users, including location and data from other apps and sites that use Google services. The company has added new controls, such as the ability to mute an ad that is following a user across the web, and has reorganized existing controls to turn off features like personalized ads, but it isn’t possible to opt out of all data collection.

In the policy, Google justifies much of that data collection under another method in GDPR called “legitimate interest.” Companies’ use of that justification is also likely to spark legal scrutiny, lawyers and privacy experts say.

. . . .

Verizon Communications Inc.’s Oath, which includes Yahoo and AOL, says in its new European privacy policy that if users withdraw their consent to collecting their data—including web-browsing habits or location data—that they “may not have access to all (or any) of our services.”

“Processing of your information for the purposes of personalized content and ads is a necessary part of the services we provide,” the policy explains.

Link to the rest at The Wall Street Journal

As the title of the OP states, you always have the option not to use a service like Facebook if you don’t want the company to gather personal information from the information you make available to them by logging on, posting and/or clicking.

If that’s not an option, Incognito Mode on the Chrome browser provides some limited protection by preventing identifying cookies and autofill details from being saved on your computer/tablet/cell phone, but it doesn’t protect your online history from examination by your internet service provider or prevent third-party groups from tracking your online activity or knowing your geographical location.

The terms of service of browser providers are less than models of clarity. Here’s a link to those for the TOS for Google’s Chrome browser. So you’re clear, there are lots of other TOS provisions that apply to your use of Google’s various other services.

Your privacy rights while in Incognito mode are set forth in a separate document, Google Chrome Privacy Notice. Here’s what it says about Incognito:

You can limit the information Chrome stores on your system by using incognito mode or guest mode. In these modes, Chrome won’t store certain information, such as:

Basic browsing history information like URLs, cached page text, or IP addresses of pages linked from the websites you visit
Snapshots of pages that you visit
Records of your downloads, although the files you download will still be stored elsewhere on your computer or device
How Chrome handles your incognito or guest information
Cookies. Chrome won’t share existing cookies with sites you visit in incognito or guest mode. Sites may deposit new cookies on your system while you are in these modes, but they’ll only be stored and transmitted until you close the last incognito or guest window.

Browser configuration changes. When you make changes to your browser configuration, like bookmarking a web page or changing your settings, this information is saved. These changes are not affected by incognito or guest mode.

Permissions. Permissions you grant in incognito mode are not saved to your existing profile.

Profile information. In incognito mode, you will still have access to information from your existing profile, such as suggestions based on your browsing history and saved passwords, while you are browsing. In guest mode, you can browse without seeing information from any existing profiles.

Regardless of what you might have thought, your identity is definitely not cloaked for Google and others in incognito mode.

Without getting into the weeds, if you want to take a major step toward online privacy, you’ll have to use a non-standard browser and make some significant tradeoffs in the process. Tor is the best-known of these (although it has its own privacy problems and some ISP’s block Tor). Here’s a list of some others.

PG claims no extraordinary knowledge or expertise about online security. He’s happy to learn more from visitors to TPV.

 

 

22 thoughts on “Agree to Facebook’s Terms or Don’t Use It”

  1. “Agree to Facebook’s Terms or Don’t Use It”

    Too bad if we don’t use FB FB will still use ‘us’ through others.

    A FB drone takes a picture of a group of friends and posts it, your face was in the shot.

    FB asks its drones if they know anyone if anyone knows those in the picture. Those that ID you FB knows are ‘friends’ of yours.

    One of those drone ‘friends’ sends you an email while still logged into FB in another tab. FB now has your face, name, and email address.

    Going by what your drone ‘friends’ seem interested in, FB can now suggest to advertisers what they might offer you by email.

    (All without ‘you’ agreeing to their terms and no way for you to have it deleted – you’re not a member …)

    • Exactly. The collection of data is now ubiquitous and collects even those who deliberately opt out. As for need. Internet tech companies [ALL of them] collect waaaaaay more data than is required to provide the service /users/ want. Users, by and large, only want to use Facebook as a way of connecting to their friends and family. It’s Facebook that wants to sell advertising, for which it ‘needs’ to collect data to feed the algorithms [because the more data they have to work with, the more ‘efficient’ they become].

      Another issue is the sharing of this collected information. Android on your phone uses geo location unless you specifically turn it off. Android belongs to Google/Alphabet. Google/Alphabet share with Facebook [and others]. The net effect is a blanket spy network from which you can’t escape.

      Tech companies justify this blanket data collection as the price users have to pay for the ‘free’ services they enjoy. As you say though, even those who don’t enjoy those services have to pay the same price.

      • As for need. Internet tech companies [ALL of them] collect waaaaaay more data than is required to provide the service /users/ want.

        Of course they do. They collect what their customers want. Their customers are advertisers. Users are just raw material.

  2. I didn’t agree to Facebook terms when I first read their TOS so never opened an account. I am beginning to think I am the only writer left who has never visited/opened an account on Facebook. However, I am sure they track me as a ghost user via my family and other authors. 🙂

    • I don’t have a FB account either, but I did sign up for Google long before they started collecting private data. 🙁

      I’ve tried, over the years, to delete parts of my account – YouTube for example – but last I checked, it was all or nothing. And I’m not quit ready to delete my Blogger account.

    • I also lack FB. I had a stalker and don’t want to give him any encouragement. And not being able to set up an account only for my pen-name was a major red flag.

      I’ve got my blog. That’s it.

  3. RE: Google Chrome browser
    What else is there? I mean that seriously.

    Firefox is a resource hog. It slows my system so much that I cannot run anything else.

    Internet Explorer wobbles and crashes when I run 20 open tabs.

    I cannot get Brave to stay up. It opens and crashes.

    What is there besides Chrome?

    • I make occasional use of QupZilla and Pale Moon.

      For well-behaved sites, I use Konqueror, which is so much faster than anything else I’m not willing to switch away. Besides its built-in adblocking, site filtering, and a rockin’ file manager, it’s a dessert topping *and* a floor wax…

    • for me, chrome takes more resources than firefox.I commonly have dozens of windows open and hundreds of tabs

      Firefox used to be a huge resource hog, but they have made a lot of progress

      I run Linux, different OSs will have different results.

  4. But when it comes to authorizing Facebook to collect that data, the company now gives users a stark choice: agree to its new terms of service or delete their accounts.

    One interesting aspect of this is that it is extraordinarily difficult to truly delete your account. My first account on Facebook was an author page. Despite the fact that I closed that account, it still lingers on, alive on Facebook’s servers (although hidden, I believe). If I click the wrong buttons when signing in to my current Facebook account, the old page pops open, freshly reactivated by my wrong click.

  5. I quit Facebook when the troll ads hit the news. I was there under a pen name, so I don’t know if or how my privacy was violated — other than my surfing history.

  6. Unfortunately the ‘don’t use it’ option ensures that nothing will change, nothing will be challenged, no accountability will be required. Talk about your short-term thinking.
    Certainly, stop using it if you choose, but don’t let that be the end of your engagement with the issue.

  7. I do use Firefox, and yes, it does hog resources after a while, but that’s what the Task Manager is for. I’ve also found that DuckDuckGo is a more than adequate substitute for Google the search engine.
    For online commercial transactions, I’m trialling a prepaid card. I can top it up from my internet banking screen but the card has no connection to that bank account, so I feel a little safer. And therein lies a problem no one’s facing – this isn’t just a question of online ‘privacy’. It’s also a problem for online security, especially when the online and offline overlap.

  8. I’m posting this in Pale Moon with javascript turned off. (You have to go to about:config in the address bar to do this in Firefox clones.) I’d also note Vivaldi, Waterfox, and SeaMonkey.

    My advice is have more than one browser installed. Browsers with features and plug ins installed and turned on should be used for specific things with known trusted websites, then closed. General browsing should be done on a browser with Javascript etc. off. This way a browser left on with many tabs open will be doing less, and have less issues with memory leaks.

    Memory leaks are pretty endemic to browsers, as are security flaws. Web technology and browser ecology change fairly rapidly, that means browsers are constantly being patched and adding features, making the code complex and good design difficult.

    I’d stay away from Yandex, Chrome and I think Opera. (IIRC, the Chinese run Opera now.) Who makes the software, is it open source, and what is the organization? Open source gives some insurance against malware built into the software. Information warfare is a real thing, know who your major adversaries are, and don’t just install things they make all willy nilly.

    Re: Cambridge Analytica. It is great people are taking this more seriously, but this is hardly the first time. See the 2012 and 2008 elections for example. For whatever reason, media tends not to heavily report on the doings of our major information warfare adversaries.

  9. I’ve been software and computer engineering professional for many years and I have worked with many Fortune 500 companies setting up secure systems and designing and building secure software.

    I would never stake my life that a computer system is secure or that no one is snooping on my data, but I have several suggestions to bolster your privacy and security.

    First, accept automatic updates and use the latest versions of all software. It’s a leap of faith, but the software being written today is much more secure and private than the stuff I wrote a few years ago. Both the good guys and the bad guys are much smarter now.

    Second, use a good anti-malware scanner, and keep it up to date. Windows Defender is now pretty good, convenient, and it is dirt simple to keep up and running. Other products may be better, but harder for a lot of folks to keep up and effective. On my own systems I combine Windows Defender with the free version of MalwareBytes.

    Third, there are some excellent browser add-ons available. I use NoScript, Privacy Badger, HTTPS Everywhere, and uBlock Origin installed on FireFox. They are all free, minimally intrusive, and work together fairly well to prevent excessive ads, data leakage, and insecure connections. Not perfect, but the combination is protective without completely destroying performance.

    Fourth, get rid of the shovelware, unwanted software that seems to accumulate and is never used. These applications are similar to a pile of garbage that attracts hackers like flies. Clean them up. Get rid of them. Your computer will run better and you will be safer. Never install anything that you are not sure why you should install or have any doubts about the integrity of the source.

    Finally, FaceBook and similar services are free in the sense that they do not charge you, but they are still a billion dollar business. You may rest assured that they hold daily meetings looking for ways to make a buck off you. That’s not necessarily bad, but they live and die by returning profit to their investors, not by being nice or civil to you.

    If you are getting great benefits from Facebook, for example, I would continue to use it, but look at your privacy settings and use some common sense in what you post. However, if Facebook is not adding much to your quality of life, get out of there. They are taking from you and you are getting nothing in return.

    As an author of a book on personal cybersecurity, I have a lot of other common sense suggestions in my book, but let me leave with this thought: cyberspace is wonderful and can improve almost anyone’s life, but it adds new dangers that are as real as the dangers faced by pioneers in the wilderness, nations in world wars, or soldiers on a battlefield. Taking care today is not the same as taking care only a decade ago.

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