To its credit, Google offers a centralized and relatively user-friendly place from which to view and control your account, but I found the breadth of the data collection more unnerving than the relief I got from being able to exert a little control over it.

I finished my Google-data detox with a mixture of satisfaction and wariness. But it turns out Google was entry-level detox. When I moved on to Facebook, I pretty much lost it.

It was relatively easy to figure out some of what Facebook thinks it knows about me, thanks to a Chrome browser extension called What Facebook Thinks You Like. Whereas Google listed 28 things I appear to like, Facebook listed 713: “New York metropolitan area,” “Step Up (film),” “observational comedy,” “law school,” “motorsport,” “Michelle Obama,” “global warming,” and, oddly, “missing person.”

Facebook’s accuracy was spotty. I do love New York, the Step Up films (teen dance movies are my jam), and Michelle Obama (because I’m a patriot). I do not like “motorsports” or “law school.” No one likes law school. I also don’t like “global warming.” Nor “missing person.”

I was briefly amused by the discrepancies between the real me and the picture painted by Facebook, but it also prompted a question: How accurate do I want my data portrait to be if it is being used primarily to encourage me to part with my time, attention, and money? I toyed with the idea of whether or not, in the interest of my own privacy, I ought to obscure the real me with misleading signals.

What if I started liking Facebook pages about guns and engaging with content about white nationalism (or, worse, electronic dance music)? Of course, if I did that, I would also hinder the platform’s ability to provide value by knowing as much as it does about me.

Did I want to spend my time and energy making Facebook less efficient and more chaotic for myself? Is that what it would take to be truly free—to inconvenience myself by pretending to be someone else?

Like Google, Facebook has a settings page from which I can view and adjust my security and privacy settings. I also decided to look at the “Apps and Websites” and “Ads” settings, which are not listed in a way that suggests they are related to security and privacy, even though they obviously are. (Since Mark Zuckerberg was hauled before Congress in April 2018, this section of the settings page has changed, so your experience may vary slightly from mine.)

Given recent headlines, I was compelled to scrutinize the section about apps. When I got to that page, the first thing I saw was a monster of a disclaimer:

On Facebook, your name, profile picture, cover photo, gender, networks, username, and user id are always publicly available to both people and apps. … Apps also have access to your friends list and any information you choose to make public.

It has become central to an international news story that Facebook shares user data with linked apps, but I think it’s safe to bet that very few of Facebook’s two billion users had any idea until recently that this was part of the terms of service.

As another point of clarification: in Facebook-speak, “apps” refers to multiple things. They are the apps you launch from within Facebook (remember those?), the services you log in to with your Facebook ID, and the services you’ve “connected” to your Facebook account, including some websites. When I popped over to the Apps tag, I saw more than 400 listed. I literally screamed out loud. (I mean literally literally.)

To get our heads around why this matters, let’s look at one particular app on the list. Years ago, I discovered a mobile app called GateGuru. It’s operated by TripAdvisor and lets me browse airport maps and directories from my phone. This is obviously more convenient than hunting down information kiosks—which are, it seems to me, always inconveniently located.

I logged in to the app with my Facebook account because it was faster that way and I was hungry. That decision marked the beginning of a trilateral trade relationship between me, GateGuru, and Facebook: I used my Facebook identity to quickly access GateGuru. In exchange, GateGuru helped me find the Shake Shack closest to my departure gate.

In that deal, Facebook gave GateGuru the following information about me: My name, gender, birthday, all my friends’ names, my employers, my schools, all my status updates, every Facebook group I belong to or page I like, my events, photos I’ve uploaded or been tagged in, my religious and political views, my hometown, my current city, my videos, my website URL, the content and member list of the Facebook groups I manage, and my relationship status, which I would describe in this instance as “Super Fucked.”

Even if GateGuru doesn’t abuse my data, there is no way for me to know how robust its security is — or that of the 400-plus apps that have been collecting my data for years.

Horrified by the what-ifs, I spent more than an hour going through all the apps I had authorized, and I removed hundreds of them. No surprise, there was no bulk removal option when I did this—this feature has since been added—so I had to go through each and every one of them in a rhythm of click, scroll, remove, wait, curse, click, scroll, remove, wait, curse.

Deleting an app, however, doesn’t change what data it already has collected about you. I realized this after removing the ESPN app. Feeling empowered by the user choice I just exercised, I was presented with a pop-up screen stating: “ESPN may still have access to info you previously shared, but can’t make additional requests for private info…Contact ESPN for details on how to delete your info.” And when I clicked on “Contact ESPN,” I was redirected to the general privacy policy for the Walt Disney Company. Facebook hurled me at a generic legal page for a $148 billion corporation. Is that how the company plans to “bring the world closer together”?

I then downloaded all my data from an easy-to-miss link on the settings page (it’s here). I deleted three years’ worth of search history, location history, and video-watching history that I didn’t know the company was holding. I turned the sharing defaults from “public” to “friends” or “just me” on just about everything. I made myself harder to find. I deleted the contact information for more than 3,000 people I had unwittingly uploaded to Facebook. (I discovered this on a random page nowhere near the privacy settings.)

We’re the raw material for the next phase in computer science: The computers study us and then take that data and run with it.

Facebook has long enabled and encouraged this system of data collection, sometimes under the guise of user empowerment: “We give you the power to share as part of our mission to make the world more open and connected” is how the company has put it in the past.

But a company that has spent billions in acquisitions and invested heavily in everything from virtual reality to drones can get different things done when it wants to. Facebook has 25,000 employees and generated more than $40 billion in revenue in 2017. This same company knew about the Cambridge Analytica data abuse in 2015 and didn’t act on it until it was reported by the press.

In response to massive and unrelenting global pressure, the company is finally starting to deploy some of its resources to secure users’ privacy on the platform. It has announced initiatives like Clear History and launched an investigation and audit of apps that had access to our data.

But Facebook investigating app makers for data abuse is like Breaking Bad’s Walter White investigating Jesse for all that meth he made in Walter’s lab using Walter’s scientific knowledge. Those apps would not have our data without Facebook in the first place. Nowhere in these newfound data-protection solutions has Facebook acknowledged its role in creating the problem.

Knowing all this, it’s hard to take seriously the man who in March testified before Congress and then posted this on, yes, Facebook: “We have a responsibility to protect your data, and if we can’t then we don’t deserve to serve you.”

Once I’d looked closely at Google and Facebook, my thoughts moved to the apps I had installed on my iPhone. Curious what data they have the ability to collect, I picked one — Evernote, since I use it daily — and decided to take a look at the most dreaded and inscrutable copy on any product: the terms of service (TOS). Cue thunder, lightning, organ music.