Musings of a Modern Day Cyberneticist
NPR's Ailsa Chang speaks with Sandy Parakilas, who worked as an operations manager on the platform team at Facebook in 2011 and 2012. In the wake of the Cambridge Analytica scandal, Parakilas says Facebook cannot be trusted to regulate itself.
A bit “I-told-you-so” without any indication of how hard he may have fought for better handling of the data, but there were certainly others outside the company decrying their practices at the time.
Syndicated copies to:Five days after details about Cambridge Analytica were made public, Mark Zuckerberg, the chief executive of Facebook, broke his silence on his company’s role in the data breach.
Minutes after posting a statement on Facebook, he spoke with The New York Times.
On today’s episode:
• Kevin Roose, a business columnist for The Times.
Background reading:
• Facebook, in crisis over the Cambridge Analytica data breach, vows to bolster security and privacy.
• A transcript of Mr. Zuckerberg’s conversation with Mr. Roose and another Times reporter, Sheera Frenkel.
I think Roose humanizes Zuckerberg a bit too much in his discussion of his interview. Facebook has some of the best and brightest engineering talent and a multi-billion dollar war chest. They’ve known about their pending problem for quite a while now and should have long since begun building a remedy. The plain truth is that they’ve actively chosen not to. Worse, even with the swirling problems in the public consciousness, they’re not actively doing anything much to fix things after-the-fact other than paying it some lip service. If Zuckerberg is as seemingly naive as Roose suggests, he needs to be removed from his position.
I’m coming much closer to calling it quits on Facebook. I’ve outlined a plan for extracting myself and just need to begin implementation. I’ve even got a potential scalable plan for family/friends who would like to leave as well.
I actually feel like my remaining on the platform is subsidizing keeping many third world people on it, and the way Facebook has been and is operating in many other countries it becomes a moral issue which is forcing me to actively seek to leave it.
Syndicated copies to:The IndieWeb has been compiling a list of silo-quits. If you know of anyone who has quit Facebook, feel free to either add them to the wiki or comment below with a note. #DeleteFacebook
Syndicated copies to:Following much of the recent Facebook privacy and data scandal over the past several days, 1–4 today I deleted 169 of 184 apps which had access to all or parts of my Facebook data. Often many of them also had access to data by proxy of my family, friends, and acquaintances.
Of those apps still remaining, 7 are apps that I’ve made personally, and the remainder solely help me export data from Facebook. Short of quitting the platform altogether, this feels like a good first step to limiting the data that I leak into the platform and their partners.
For several years now I’ve been posting content to my own personal website first and syndicating it to Facebook secondarily. Few, if any, of these old apps need any legitimate access to my account anymore presuming that they ever really did.
Want to do an audit of your own app access and make a similar purge? The IndieWeb community has some resources for doing so quickly. Looking for a better place to own and better control your own data? They can help there too.
