Your Facebook data is in greater danger than you probably know

Daniel Wagner says that the Cambridge Analytica drama should be an opportunity to inform people of how easily criminals, terrorists and others can access their personal data, as well as how frequently hacking and security breaches happen

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Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg testifies before the Senate judiciary and commerce committees on April 10 in Washington over social media data breaches. Photo: Abaca Press/TNS

Published: 12:00pm, 15 Apr 2018Updated: 6:10pm, 15 Apr 2018

All the attention on Facebook and Cambridge Analytica regarding breach of trust and exploitation of personal data is richly deserved. This raises fundamental questions about internet privacy and the obligations of all service providers collecting, consuming and using individuals’ data.

It is critically important to have meaningful discussions about the right thing to do vis-à-vis online data collection and dissemination. It is equally important that everyone become better informed about what the issues really are, and what is actually possible to achieve in data management.

Social media is a primary contributor to one of the most pressing concerns of our time – virtual terrorism – because so little is known about where our shared information may end up or what unknown actors may do with it. In the United States, social networks are considered public spaces; information shared there is covered under the “third-party doctrine”, meaning users cannot reasonably expect privacy regarding the data their service providers collect about them. Any data you post online – regardless of privacy settings – or any data collected by third parties with whom you have an agreed-upon business relationship, is not private, yet many willingly stream data and images to their “network”.

In 2010, Eric Schmidt of Google noted that the world produced as much information in two days as we did from the dawn of civilisation until 2003. As of 2016, we produced as much information in 10 minutes as did the first 10,000 generations of human beings. There is no way to monitor and protect all this data.

Facebook admitted in 2011 (when it had “just” 750 million users) that more than 600,000 of its accounts were compromised daily. Each breach could be used for identity theft, criminal impersonation, tax fraud, health insurance scams or other crimes. In November last year, Facebook estimated that as many as 60 million accounts, or 2 to 3 per cent of the company’s 2.07 billion monthly users, were fakes.