And, frankly, I was a little disappointed.
Probably some data miner could find some interesting tidbits in the information I downloaded. And had I been a better data miner myself in the hour I spent with my data, I might have found something more interesting than a defunct cell phone number.
I’ll admit the irony that to download this information, I had to enter my Facebook password twice and was admonished not to share the information around, as some of it might be private. Apparently, Facebook will pass it out like candy to every developer who asks for it. And they don’t even really have to ask.
Some of the stories I’ve read about Facebook’s memory make it sound spooky that this Silicon Valley behemoth has all this information about us. About me.
The thought swimming foremost in my mind is that, as I looked through the data, there was nothing there that I hadn’t voluntarily shared with Facebook. And since I don’t do many of those quizzes or link other apps or services via Facebook, there weren’t a lot of third-party folks poking through my information – the only advertiser that had my information is Target.
And none of it was really all that exciting.
A good data miner would infer I love TV and movies. But generally old TV and movies, like MASH, 1984’s Ghostbusters, quite a variety of stuff from The Simpsons and the likes of The Pink Panther and The Private Eyes, starring Don Knotts and Tim Conway.
A good data miner would quickly figure out I have kids. And dogs. And a wife who occasionally checks in on Facebook but generally keeps away from it (not because she’s scared of it, but because she’s got better ways to occupy her time than I do). Maybe they’d get to know the names of the kids and definitely the names of the dogs – which could lead to finding the answers to the security questions ubiquitous to the Internet. So I ought to be more careful with what questions I choose to answer there.
An even better data miner could probably reveal some things about me that maybe I’d find a little spooky. But a mere mortal like myself looking at this information is going to say “meh,” and move on.
I have experienced bad juju thanks to my online presence. I have had credit card information stolen online twice. Both times I can trace the theft to Apple and its insistence that I keep a credit card on file with them via iTunes, even though I have NEVER purchased anything via iTunes. After the latest breach, I just left that credit card info blank, and too bad for Apple.
And I’m not blind to what the likes of Cambridge Analytica might be doing with our data (though what it does with it is more a reflection of the times we live in, and the political dirty tricks we’re already used to, and I can say this as an amateur scholar in the skullduggery of the campaigns of both Richard Nixon and John Kennedy).
(That such stuff happened before is no excuse for it to happen today, of course.)
What can we mere mortals do about it?
We can get our news from a variety of sources. There is no source out there – none – that is without bias, but some are more trustworthy than others. The more diverse sources we get our information from, the better.
We can learn to sort truth from truthiness. That’s the harder bit. But we should read from sources that make our feelings tingle because they agree with us, and read from sources that make us mad because they don’t. Often the truth lies with us. Often it lies with others. Most often, it lies somewhere between the two extremes.
Truth is sometimes found atop ivory towers. It’s also quite at home in the swamp.
Most importantly, we can walk away. Just because the news and skullduggery operate 24 hours a day doesn’t mean we need to soak up every bit of it.
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