Facebook Slave – Nothing you do on Facebook is private!

Now you are a Facebook Slave!

End of last year the “Huffpost” published an easily readable article about “facebook privacy”. I recommend you to read the original article. Said article starts with this paragraph:

Didn’t Read Facebook’s Fine Print? Here’s Exactly What It Says

So, like every other one of the world’s 1.28 billion monthly active Facebook users, you blindly agreed to Facebook’s Terms and Conditions without reading the fine print.

You entrusted your photo albums, private messages and relationships to a website without reading its policies. And you do the same with every other site … sound about right?

In your defense, Carnegie Mellon researchers determined that it would take the average American 76 work days to read all the privacy policies they agreed to each year. So you’re not avoiding the reading out of laziness; it’s literally an act of job preservation.

So here are the Cliffs Notes of what you agreed to when you and Facebook entered into this contract. Which, by the way, began as soon as you signed up:

Nothing you do on Facebook is private. Repeat: Nothing you do on Facebook is private. You are a facebook slave!

Quoted from facebook:

The worst of all this is the last line: “things we infer from your use of Facebook”.  Facebook uses programs that interprete and match your date in their monstruous databases. Fortunately their algorithms are far behind of Google, Apple and Microsoft. They only found one of my daughters. They have still no idea of my education. And my dog is still happy to have its own fb account.
But they found my real birth date because my real life friends sent me their best wishes on the real date. Other things they completely misinterpreted and did put it in my profile. My real life  friends rolled on the flor laughing (ROFL).

This is highly risky for you. Why?

Facebook sells your data not only to advertisers but of course also to government agencies. Why do you have to hand out your smartphone to immigration officers and give them your logins and your passwords? THINK! They already have you earmarked because of facebook & Co.

You do not believe?

Read here a small part of everything you accepted when you signed up to facebook. It is only 3,502 words out of some 14,000 words of the whole legal stuff. This link goes to a safe copy.
Facebook’s Terms and Conditions

CAUTION: Do not read them on the facebook website. They immediately get information about you and your place.

Your information lets Facebook sell the power of your profile to brands and companies.

Even worse, they can “enhance” your profile without your consent. In my case they inserted a school I have never visited. They stole a phone number during my last holiday (marked PENDING).

You hide your position on your phone and your computer?

facebook knows where you are! Because you are a facebook slave!

From your first contact with them they store two important thing about you. Each time you login, they store a record about you. This looks like this:

Sunday, June 11, 2017 at 10:15am UTC+08
IP Address: 122.53.156.60
Browser: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; WOW64; rv:53.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/53.0
Cookie: …WLBZ

facebook knows exactely what date, what time you logged in and they think to know from where. This can bring you in real troubles!
They use, like me, Geolookup services. You enter the IP address and get the position of device. You can test yourself: https://www.iplocation.net/ 

The problem is the quality of these services. The first service had been almost perfect. The error is only about 20 kilometers.

The second service is a pure horror trip. This service located me in Angeles City. How do I explain my wife that I had been on Camiguion island? With this data facebook may send advertisement on my wall offering a very sex hotel in Angeles City. Angeles City is the biggest brothel in the Philippines.

If you want to see your facebook slave information

If you want to know your own information stored in the facebook database, you can download it. Please be aware that it contains a really big mass of data. My data was 276 MByte compressed. Once you have downloaded the file called facebook-yourname.zip. Extract the file into a new folder. Inside the folder you find index.htm. Click on it and in your browser you see, what facebook gives you back. It’s absolutely not all data, but it is already very interesting.

In the Facebook settings for your account — right below the link to deactivate it — there’s an option to download a copy of all your Facebook data. The file can be a creepy wake-up call: All those years of browsing the News Feed, and sharing selfies, engagements and birthday wishes on Facebook have taught the company quite a lot about you. You, the user, are part of the reason that Facebook has become so good at targeting ads. You’re giving them everything they need to do it.

Log into your account and go to the settings page. Click on the link to download your archive, and follow the prompts,

Once you request it, Facebook will send two emails: The first acknowledges that a request was made, and the other gives you a link to go get the file when it’s ready. The size of your file — and therefore the time it takes for Facebook to create it — will vary.

How facebook caught me?

Since I signed up on Wednesday, May 6, 2009 at 4:40am UTC+08, I used my pen-name “Renato sa Camiguin”. I never got a complaint. Everything went smooth and all my friends call me Renato. And then early 2016 I committed the error! I signed up to AirBnB with my facebook-ID.

In the beginning nothing happened and we travelled and slept in wonderful properties available on AirBnB. The hosts called and still call me Renato. Then in February 2018 we decided to offer our guesthouse on AirBnB. As a host you undergo a much tougher verification at AirBnB. So I sent AirBnb a copie of my passport and of course my real name.

This was the moment facebook did hit. You must know that if you sign up to a new service with your facebook-ID, facebook is monitoring your interaction with this service. Two days later I received the menacing e-mail from facebook. (see here).

Conclusion: Never use your facebook-ID or google-ID to sign up for another service. Never!

I would like to thank David Humphrey

David Humphreys is the original artist of this article’s title image. I slightly modified the picture by inserting the title and the little “f” on some finger puppets.

Title picture by David Humphrey:  http://wave.coop/about-wave-design/

[GARD]