How to tame the Facebook privacy dragon?

These days everyone is complaining that Facebook is a monster which is out to sell our data against our wishes. It seems that we are helpless and can do nothing. WRONG!

Bizarrely, we blame FB for what is essentially our fault. We have willingly given so much information to Facebook, that many a times they know more about us than our best friends and parents. After committing this mistake, we crib about privacy issues.

If you go to Times Square, New York on a Saturday evening and dance naked, you cannot bitch about privacy!

So what is the solution? The solution is not to never go to Times Square, i.e. leave Facebook. It is a fantastic tool, I sincerely thank the guy who came up with the idea and will continue using it. The solution is cover up. Mess up your data and make it worthless for advertising purposes. A few simple tricks are

1. Set your age to 14. The only piece of information worth sharing is your birthday
2. Do not add your school and college information. You have the likes of LinkedIn for that
3. Do not click through links posted on Facebook. Copy and paste them directly into browser Facebook will never know if you liked a particular link or not.
4. Go like random stuff as well. Your data on preferences will be confused. Or just put comments saying you like it or not in weird language and weird spelling.
5. Go and reject all ads marking them obnoxious.
6. Change your sex. Your friends know about your plumbing even if the relationship is platonic.
7. Do not use Facebook provided tools to share information as declaring someone a spouse or a sibling. Mention that elsewhere – like in a note or in a picture

If someone builds a tool to implement some of the above mentioned ideas after getting inspired by this article, please acknowledge my contribution to your effort by declaring where you got the idea from.

Here is a CARTOON which talks about the impact of such an obfuscation exercise.

I am admitting with a lot of pain that I am not the smartest guy around. Therefore, I am sure you can come up with many more ideas. Please feel free to put them in comments below.

Please be advised that personalization is the future of human race. The way you fill forms to get accepted to schools, go abroad and get healthcare, even IT firms need information to serve you well. Trust me that you want those personalized services. Therefore, to some people, you will provide good information. The good people are those that are honest about their intentions. If they want to sell our data, they will explain it to us and will help us make an intelligent choice.

Therefore, what we need is a comprehensible transparent privacy policy and a reasonable code of ethics on part of every company which handles our information. We do not want reams of legal bullshit. They are as bad as a lie. An average internet user cannot comprehend them. We should have a few bullet points and 3-4 classes of data which can be either blocked or unblocked at user discretion. This is will enable us to understand what is at stake, and will help an average well-meaning Joe or a female Joe working at these firms protect our data.

If you think this article is useful, PASS IT ON and please do check the CARTOON.