In the wake of the disturbing news regarding Cambridge Analytica’s recent data breach, and their resulting fallout with Facebook, the data social media companies collect on its users has become somewhat of a hot button issue. Suddenly millions of people worldwide have become painfully aware of the reach sites like Facebook have, prompting the #DeleteFacebook hashtag to circulate on Twitter and landing the social media giant in hot water. Of course, Facebook’s egregious use of our personal data isn’t anything new. The site, and those who run it, have been playing it fast and loose with personal security and European law for the past couple of years — this is just the first most people are hearing about it. So, it begs the question, was it all worth it? The enormous backlash and staggering rate at which Facebook’s stock has dipped in the past week would imply that it isn’t, but the only way to truly answer that question is with another — what is your private data worth to Facebook?

You, or rather your data, is worth an unquantifiable amount of money to Facebook. That data can be sold to millions of different sites; sites that are and aren’t directly linked to Facebook. After all, Facebook is free to use and yet the platform is worth several billion dollars. So how do they amass their enormous wealth?

Their main tool for data collation is Facebook Pixel, a little widget that any business operator or any site-owner can install on their webpage. It’s extremely simple to use and to install, and it’s free. Well, sort of. Whilst writing this article, I got the chance to speak with a former marketing department manager for a European music distributor. He prefers to stay anonymous, however he is comfortable sharing that he spent roughly “half a million euros” on Facebook’s targeted ads system during his time in Online Marketing. He explained to me that “basically the only thing you can pay money for on Facebook (apart from consumer stuff like in-app, shop or messenger purchases) is really just running ads. All the functionality around it comes “for free” — as in, not really free, because you’re still paying for the actual ads.”

Now what exactly Pixel does is simultaneously vague and convoluted, but essentially it helps whoever is advertising something through Facebook keep track of how effective their advert is. Are you advertising for a newsletter? Facebook Pixel will tell you if they signed up or not. Are you selling a product? Facebook Pixel will tell you if the user completed the transaction, or alternatively if they left the product in their basket. Nothing too sketchy here.

What is sketchy is that Facebook stores this data on their own servers, not only to help the site in question sell their product, but also to find out exactly what you are spending your money on and which advertisers are best suited to your Facebook timeline. Say for instance you go to an online retailer and you put a pair of shoes in your basket. For one reason or another, you don’t complete the purchase but you leave the shoes in your basket. Facebook will not only know about this, but using their targeted ads system and Facebook Pixel, they will advertise the same brand of shoes to you to remind you to go back to the aforementioned site and complete the purchase.

But, as my source pointed out, Facebook Pixel isn’t the only tool advertisers have at their disposal. “In general,” he explains, “it’s important to understand that every player in the advertising and analytics industry has their own tracking systems and data can be securely moved between platforms. So it’s not only the Facebook Pixel, although it is the most popular — only rivaled by Google.”

Now, for the sake of fairness, it’s important I point out that Facebook is very upfront with how exactly Pixel works. Not only can a quick Google search point you toward most of this information with relative ease, but Facebook also goes out of its way to tell you exactly how and why they collate all of this data. The problem is, even though they do have a section for this information on their site, it’s not exactly obvious how you, the consumer, can reach it. To do so you have to click on a teeny, tiny little tab underneath one of their ads that says “Sponsored”. It’s all wrapped up in their Terms of Service but, let’s be honest, nobody reads all that technical lawyer-babble in its entirety. It’s designed to be difficult to read and as jargon-filled as possible to dissuade the common man from delving into all of their company secrets.

Whilst this kind of practice certainly isn’t illegal, it has landed Facebook in legal trouble before. A German court recently ruled in favour of the Federation of German Consumer Organisations, a consumer rights watchdog, who took Facebook to court late last year. Facebook was taken to task over hiding “default settings that are not privacy-friendly in its privacy centre” by the court, and for failing to make this clear to users when they register for the site.

Germany’s cartel office FCO also made a statement in December last year stating that the site’s “data collection violates mandatory European data protection principles” following their preliminary ruling. In short, all this is covered under Europe’s informed consent laws — which essentially forces companies to be extremely upfront with their consumers about exactly what information they’re taking from them, and what they’re using it for. Heiko Duenkel, litigation policy officer at the FCO, was quoted after the ruling in February saying that Facebook failed to “meet the requirement for informed consent.” Unfortunately for a lot of countries outside the EU, like North America, their rights aren’t held in as high regard. European countries are notorious for their stance on data protection and online privacy, which is why Facebook were taken to court in Germany and France — but not in the States.

If you want, you can actually check some of this information that Facebook has collected on you. In Settings, under the Ads category, there’s a delightful little section called “Your Information”. By clicking on Your Categories under this listing, you can view all the different subsections Facebook lists you under. For instance, my Facebook somehow knows I own an iPhone 7, most likely because I’ve logged into the Facebook app on my phone. It knows I own a Mac, because I’m listed as a Mac Sierra user. It also lists me as an “Engaged Shopper”, which is supposedly because I’ve clicked “on the call-to-action button “Shop Now” in the past week”. All of this information it has collected on me is used to sell me products on my Facebook timeline, which is probably why I keep seeing adverts for the new iPhone X splattered across my news feed. It’s a slightly underhanded use of my personal data but at least they’re frank about how they’re using it. Of course, that’s their excuse. They told you they’re doing it, so it’s OK right?

One thing Facebook probably doesn’t want you to find out is that they directly trade, and possibly sell, your personal history to financial credit sites like Equifax and Inspirion. These websites know everything about your financial history, from how much debt you’re in to how many credit cards you own, and Facebook shares the information it gathers on you with them.

Except, again, they are relatively upfront about this information too, specifically stating on their website that they work with “third parties like Acxiom, Datalogix (Oracle Data Cloud), Epsilon, Experian and Quantium” and that they offer “opt-out” services related with all of these sites. Yet does that excuse this blatant disregard for consumer privacy? Is it really fair that these websites, that collate your financial and personal history in a bid to line their pockets, are opt-out instead of opt-in? The only way you could prevent these companies from gathering data on you would be to opt out immediately after creating your account, which would only be possible if you were aware of said practices before you even set up your page.

Yet, most people are only just hearing about these kinds of sketchy tactics that Facebook employ to collate your data. Germany and France took Facebook to court, but for some reason the common man on the street wouldn’t have heard about it all until now. Why? Well that’s simple; it’s all Donald Trump’s fault. Cambridge Analytica worked with Donald Trump’s election team during his 2016 presidential bid, which of course makes it a headline story for every news channel in the country. Facebook have been getting away with this for years, but news of Russian meddling and corruption in the White House, as well as Robert Mueller’s upcoming case against Trump, is taking everyone down with it.

Which brings us to the initial story which kicked off this entire debacle. If you aren’t aware already, Cambridge Analytica have landed themselves in trouble for something completely separate to everything I’ve mentioned previously. To quote my previous source: “[Cambridge Analytica] exploited a feature of Facebook’s Apps API” sometime between 2008 to 2013. “Back then,” he adds, “app developers could get much more information via the API than they ever could in later versions. So CA just cooked up a bunch of quiz apps and pulled data from friends of participants (which is impossible to do today), allowing them to build the massive datasets that later made up their predictive models.”

Thankfully, the exploit Cambridge Analytica employed to gather this information was fixed in the years since. “It was not a security breach, there was no insider trading, or anything shady of the sort,” he explained, “Just stupid decisions, or more accurately, too much leeway for the developer ecosystem.”

My source did, however, want to offer a very stark warning: “The whole apparatus that came afterward — audience profiling, content creation, granular ad targeting ect — utilized every platform that’s available. Facebook itself was only vital for the foundation of this mess.”

“The footwork is done everywhere — Google, Twitter, Pinterest, Blogs & Websites, etc. I’m not trying to defend Facebook here, but to emphasize the fact that this is a systemic problem. No one wins if we’re only talking about Facebook.”

Of course, none of this explicitly proves Facebook is guilty of harvesting your data and selling it on to the highest bidder. That will take years of painfully slow court battles to prove, if it is indeed true, and even then, secrets will be hidden, documents will be shredded, and data will be deleted. What makes it worse is that Facebook also owns WhatsApp and Instagram, so you can bet your bottom dollar they’re harvesting information from those platforms too.

If you don’t believe me though, why not hear it from the main man himself? Mark Zuckerberg has been uncharacteristically quiet since news first broke on The Observer, but back in 2010 Business Insider shared a now infamous private conversation Mark had with one of his friends, just after he’d launched “The Facebook”:



Zuckerburg: Yeah so if you ever need info about anyone at Harvard

Zuckerburg: Just ask.

Zuckerburg: I have over 4,000 emails, pictures, addresses, SNS

[Redacted Friend’s Name]: What? How’d you manage that one?

Zuckerburg: People just submitted it.

Zuckerburg: I don’t know why.

Zuckerburg: They “trust me”

Zuckerburg: Dumb fucks.

Now, sure, that was 8 years ago. Mark Zuckerburg was only 19 years of age, and here he’s only dealing with the private information of 4,000 people, opposed to the 2.13 billion the site now boasts. Unfortunately, that’s all beside the point. It doesn’t matter if it’s 4,000 people, 50 million people, or just one person. Zuckerberg does not care about you, or your personal information. You are less than a “dumb fuck” to him now. You are a source of revenue. You are that extra dollar in his bank account. You are a number on a spreadsheet.

So, what can you do about it? Honestly, not much. All the data Facebook has on you is very difficult to get rid of, not to mention how difficult it is to even delete your Facebook account. If you even try to delete it, you’ll first be given the option to “deactivate your account”. Don’t bother. Not only does this do jack squat in terms of deleting your personal data, but it doesn’t even delete your account. Instead it is put into a sort of suspended state, appearing to your friends as if you have deleted your account. However, should you login after the deactivating your account, it will simply reinstate your profile as if nothing ever happened.

To actually delete your account, you have to visit this link. In doing so, you won’t erase everything. The data Facebook has collected on you, as well as your private messages, will never be deleted from their servers. The data they do delete, such as your pictures, posts on other people’s walls, status updates etc., will take 90 days to delete. Why? Nobody knows. The pessimist in me thinks it’s because they want to back up all your data so they can use it against you in the future, but maybe it really does just take that long. Only Facebook knows the answer to that question, and for some reason they don’t want to tell.

If you don’t trust Facebook to delete all this information for you — and honestly, why would you? — then you can download an extension for Google Chrome that allows you to delete everything in bulk. The app itself is called Social Book Post Manager, and I highly recommend it only if just to give you a bit of peace of mind. Before doing that, I’d suggest you visit their Personal Data Request page which explains how you can download a copy of your personal data from the site. This isn’t comprehensive though, and it’s mostly just an archive of all your Facebook posts and likes.

However, there is a little light at the end of this long, dark tunnel… if you’re an EU national, that is. On the 25th of May, this year, something called the GDPR will go into effect. GDPR stands for General Data Protection Regulation, which will replace the Data Protection Directive once it goes into effect. A quote on the eugdpr.org website explains that the GDPR is “designed to harmonize data privacy laws across Europe, to protect and empower all EU citizens data privacy and to reshape the way organizations across the region approach data privacy.” Now I won’t get into the specific details, because that’s a job for someone much more qualified than myself, but what this means is when it comes time to delete your Facebook, the GDPR will (in short) make it so that your personal data will be scrubbed clean from Facebook’s servers. Until the 25th of May, do not delete your profile if you’re an EU national. I would still suggest deactivating your account for the time being, just so Facebook knows you mean business.



In the mean time, if you want to get a handle on exactly how much data Facebook has collated on you, you’ll have to email them directly and request it… and, once again, you’ll have to live in the EU. If you’re an American citizen, they’ll more than likely just brush you off entirely or simply forward you to their Personal Data Request page. If you live in the EU however, your rights as an EU citizen outweigh Facebook’s ability to simply ignore you. Of course, that is also somewhat of a fruitless task. Facebook aren’t going to just email you all the incriminating evidence they have on themselves, so you’ll likely not get much more information than you would if you just launched a Personal Data Request through the site. Might be worth it just to give them the extra headache.

But frankly, there isn’t much point. It’s all too little, too late. Facebook has all of your personal information already, and it’s far too valuable for them to part with. After all, there’s still no concrete guarantee that they will scrub your personal data from their servers in accordance with the GDPR. Facebook accounts are free for a reason after all, because you yourself are the product. You have been from the start. Whether you were aware or not, you’ve been giving them all your personal information for years. What’s important now is that we protect ourselves from letting them gather any further knowledge on us.

It’s time to join the tens of thousands of people who have already deleted their Facebook accounts, and while you’re at it you should definitely delete your Instagram and maybe your WhatsApp too. No single company should have as much unfiltered access to your personal data as Facebook does, but time and time again we have ignored this in favour of snooping on our ex-girlfriends profiles or liking that dumb meme your friend posted on their timeline. We’ve willingly, knowingly even, handed over every aspect of our personal history to a faceless company all because our friends have done the same. Because we need that Facebook profile to make a Tinder profile. Because if you sign in with your Facebook account on that new Star Wars app, you can some extra coins! So ask yourself, do I really need a Facebook account? Really think about your answer. How hard would it be to contact your friends and ask for their numbers instead? If someone makes an event on Facebook and they really want you to come, don’t you think they’ll text you anyway? Take back a small modicum of control; delete Facebook. Or just keep letting Facebook profit off your personal information. The choice is yours. Just don’t take too long making it.