By Tyler Durden
ZeroHedge
03/27/2018
The Cambridge Analytica scandal was never really about Cambridge Analytica.
As we’ve pointed out, neither Facebook nor Cambridge Analytica have been accused of doing anything explicitly illegal (though one could be forgiven for believing they had, based on the number of lawsuits and official investigations that have been announced).
Instead, the backlash to these revelations – which has been justifiably focused on Facebook – is so severe because the public has been forced to confront for the first time something that many had previously written off as an immutable certainty: That Facebook, Google and the rest of the tech behemoths store reams of personal data, essentially logging everything we do.
In response to demands for more transparency surrounding user data, Facebook and Google are offering users the option to view all of the metadata that Google and Facebook collect.
And as Twitter user Dylan Curran pointed out in a comprehensive twitter thread examining his own data cache, the extent and bulk of the data collected and sorted by both companies is staggering.
Google, Curran said, collected 5.5 gigabytes of data on him – equivalent to some 3 million Microsoft Word documents. Facebook, meanwhile, collected only 600 megabytes – equivalent to roughly 400,000 documents.
Another shocking revelation made by Curran: Even after deleting data like search history and revoking permissions for Google and Facebook applications, Curran still found a comprehensive log of his documents and other files stored on Google drive, his search history, chat logs and other sensitive data about his movements that he had expressly deleted.
What’s worse, everything shown is the data cache of one individual. Just imagine how much data these companies hold in total.
1. https://t.co/1z255Zt1zf Google stores your location (if you have it turned on) every time you turn on your phone, and you can see a timeline from the first day you started using Google on your phone
— Dylan Curran (@iamdylancurran) March 24, 2018
2. This is every place I have been in the last twelve months in Ireland, going in so far as the time of day I was in the location and how long it took me to get to that location from my previous one pic.twitter.com/I1kB1vwntT
— Dylan Curran (@iamdylancurran) March 24, 2018
3. https://t.co/qFCgY6QLN5 Google stores search history across all your devices on a separate database, so even if you delete your search history and phone history, Google STILL stores everything until you go in and delete everything, and you have to do this on all devices
— Dylan Curran (@iamdylancurran) March 24, 2018
4. https://t.co/QRfgwkNj80 Google creates an advertisement profile based on your information, including your location, gender, age, hobbies, career, interests, relationship status, possible weight (need to lose 10lbs in one day?) and income
— Dylan Curran (@iamdylancurran) March 24, 2018
(30 More Tweets)
The question now is: Will this transparency actually change user’s behavior? Or will Facebook’s hollow promises to change be enough to lull its legions of users back into a passive ignorance. As Curran points out, people would be outraged if they discovered the government was monitoring them to this extent. But when Google does it? People hardly bat an eye.
I submit that very likely Google and Facebook ARE the government. Specifically the nice user-friendly interface to the CIA. Much of the CIA is in the field (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intelligence_outsourcing): “Former analysts and officers of the Central Intelligence Agency and Department of National Intelligence are allowed to leave their government positions and go work for companies in the private sector the next day doing the same job. This is known as “butts in seats.”‘
Is Facebook a monolithic defense contractor? Who pays for psychological experiments on users? Are they are PAID to snoop us as terms of their “research” contracts for ‘somebody’s’ IO (information operations)? It’s too bad the FCC can’t rein them in. They are hardly worthy of consideration as private corporations if their revenue comes from DOD contracts.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/kashmirhill/2014/06/28/facebook-manipulated-689003-users-emotions-for-science/#106f83d0197c
There remains concerns that FaceBook was started by the CIA with a 500 million dollar advance. Allegedly, David Rockefeller was part of this noble effort. Would you buy a used car from Mark Zuckerberg?
see / read http://www.whatdoesitmean.com/index2518.htm