From Inverse:
A huge movement could hit Facebook next Monday. Mike Schroepfer, its chief technology officer, announced on Wednesday that the company will place a link at the top of everyone’s news feed to a privacy tool. This tool will reveal whether a user’s data is embroiled in the Cambridge Analytica scandal — and it could reignite the #DeleteFacebook movement.
The announcement follows CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s promise in a March 21 interview with CNN’s Laurie Segall, when he announced a tool “where anyone can go and see if their data was a part of this.” Around 270,000 people granted permissions to an app created by researcher Aleksandr Kogan called “thisisyourdigitallife,” which promised to provide personality predictions. The app’s data was given to Cambridge Analytica — which violated Facebook’s app policies — and subsequently used to target ads during political campaigns.
. . . .
Monday’s tool could breathe new life into the movement, as the full extent of the scandal grows apparent. Around 82 percent of the 87 million potentially affected users — just over 70 million people — were users based in the U.S. That’s an important figure because that user data was used by President Donald Trump’s 2016 campaign team in a technique known as “psychographic modeling.”
Link to the rest at Inverse
PG is no friend of Facebook and, in the wake of the Cambridge Analyitica revelations, has substantially tightened his Facebook settings and downloaded his history from Facebook (pretty boring stuff).
However, the term, “psychographic modeling” has been around for years. PG believes he first heard it a long time ago when he worked for a large advertising agency (J. Walter Thompson for those who care). The agency created psychographic profiles of target audiences for its client’s products based on group interviews of consumers who were part of the target market. Group interviews were a typical part of marketing research at the time and, to the best of PG’s knowledge, still are.
Suffice to say, psychographic modeling didn’t revolutionize the advertising business or massively increase sales of anything. Despite what many believe, the typical US consumer doesn’t become an automaton after hearing an advertising message tailored to his/her particular interests and concerns.
It matters not a wit.
What they will show you isn’t all they have on you, and none of the settings will ‘remove’ what they already know – only what they will admit (to you) of knowing.
They will thank you for tagging things you don’t want others to know about.
The best you can do is to not give them any more ‘new’ data than you can. (And block their little data scraping tools. Like this page has youtube, flattr, addtoany, and two google-analytics trying to see what they can learn about me and what other sites I have open or have browsed.)
Sadly deleting Facebook won’t do much because, as you say, the data is already in their possession, but also because they will continue to track you via share buttons and other invisible goodies that populate almost every website you’re likely to visit.
Nevertheless, come April the 9th I’ll help fan the flames of outrage by ceremoniously deleting my Facebook account. Then I’ll tweet about it on Twitter, which is also tracking me, and post about it on Medium which…yeah. 🙁