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Is it not shocking to you how blatantly Facebook breaches people's expectations about the use of their data? People share data with Facebook for a particular, immediate benefit to themselves. I share my location so my friends can see where I am, I post my photos so my friends can see what I'm doing and who I'm with, I share my contacts so I can find my friends, etc. In and of itself, this should be fine and safe to do. The problem comes when Facebook takes the data that was given to them for one purpose, in one context, and they use it for another purpose now or in the future. I can't make informed consent when it comes to data, because the real value of data only comes from when it's aggregated with other data -- either my own over time, or other peoples'. I can't know what incremental effect this datum has when it's combined with everything else Facebook knows about me, and all their other users, and run through their current or future machine learning algorithm. So, it's impossible to know whether it's in my interest to disclose any particular bit of information to them. Details that are innocuous to human eyes can be very salient to algorithms. I might disclose a set of data points and never make any connection between them. I might mention I feel tired on one day, and write with a negative tone on a few other days, and wake up (i.e, open Facebook for the first time in the morning) later than usual. Without knowing this, that's enough information for Facebook to make a confident inference that I'm depressed, an inference that amounts to discovering private information I never intended to reveal. Of course, they don't disclose that they know that about me, but they do use it against me. They may target ads for anti-depressant drugs, or they may invisibly bias my news feed to have more negative content. That's even assuming I'm aware that I'm disclosing information at all. If I log into Facebook to see what my friends are up to, then close the tab and start browsing the web, Facebook knows where I go on the web any time I visit a page with Facebook comments even if I don't post any comments. The content of the page, combined with other data they know about me and the other visitors to the site, can be combined to make inferences about me, my interests and hobbies, my sex or sexual orientation, race, socioeconomic class, medical conditions, vices, and so on. We can't expect every person to become experts on data analysis so they can fully understand the implications of disclosing their data. |