The Hidden Footnotes

Thanks to the recent  revelations from the suits at Facebook and the ensuing outrage from all quarters, I have been thinking about two matters that we don’t talk about enough when all is well over in Facebook Land. The first is that most folks are still in the gray about how much data smartphone apps can and cannot access. You remember the app permissions you see every now and then? Those innocent little requests that apps make to access your camera, your microphone and your location? They tend to oversimplify their far-reaching effects, yet they pop up right when you are in the middle of something and just want to a take a selfie or book a cab. They are designed to play down what the app can do with the data, instead serving up a quick.

Allow/Don’t Allow decision that users tap past without a second thought.

It may seem obvious by now, but each of these careless micro-decisions each time you install a new app are collectively sucking up insane amounts of data about your lives.

Of course, some of these are necessary – you really can’t post a photo to Instagram without allowing access to the camera, or call a cab to your location without some amount of location access. But you surely didn’t consider that any photo you upload, say, to Facebook, would be scanned by computer vision platforms to look for familiar faces, objects and places? Or that every like, scroll and click you perform inside of the Facebook app would be packaged into a somewhat anonymous digital profile to be sold to advertisers all over the Internet?

What if I tell you that any app that accesses your location is also able to access your altitude information (a rough estimation of which floor you are on) and how frequently you visit a location? Or that, even when you revoke access to something you previously gave permission to, any data the apps could access when you granted them permission can be stored by app makers as long as they comply with local data protection and privacy laws?

The entire app permission model is broken, in that it relies consumers to intuitively understand the ramifications of these actions without fully being made aware of how deep the rabbit hole goes.

Yet, there’s another aspect to this, that of each one of us being a willing product for the likes of Facebook. At  each turn, when Facebook asked you to upload your address book to search for friends you might know, or when individual apps like Cambridge Analytica’s personality quiz vacuumed up your friend list (with your explicit permission, they would remind you!) – you agreed to this seemingly minor loss of privacy… if only to find out which Hollywood superstar you most resemble! Sure, you had nothing to hide, so there was no need to cover your tracks (or your photos/contacts), but let’s not paint ourselves as pure victims, shall we?

We willingly let ourselves be duped by these apps and quizzes while getting what we wanted from Facebook – to socially network with family and old friends. Let us acknowledge we all made these choices, and nothing was really ever forced upon us. After the dust storm of outrage settles, most of us are still going to be on Facebook, maybe a wee bit wiser.

Facebook’s strength is its network effect – when everyone you know uses Facebook, they are unlikely to move somewhere else. We need to own up to our oversharing on Facebook, which is why the tech giant has as much data on us as it already does. Far from needing protection from big Internet companies, maybe we should ask – how much do we need to be protected from ourselves?