marten-assignment6-untrack-me.md

CHLOE MARTEN
QUANT HUMANISTS
SPRING 2018
19 03 2018

Assignment 6: Untrack Me, link to assignment

Over the last year, I have stopped using Facebook for the most part as I find the content generated on the platform loud and unproductive. I have yet to delete my Facebook entirely because I still find useful in tracking down a friend every once in awhile. However, I don’t like that Facebook has all this data on me (data since 2008) that it uses to personify me and to sell to advertisers. I recently watched this video from The Wall Street Journal that provides details on how Facebook tracks and serves you advertisements.

“Why It Feels Like Facebook Is Listening Through Your Mic”, WSJ

The video provides some useful tips to limit Facebook’s tracking, but I wanted to take it a step further. Sure I can opt-out of geo-location, but Facebook still knows what I look like, where I live, my news preferences, and more. For my Untrack Me assignment, I put together a how to guide for tricking Facebook about who you really are.

Hack Your Facebook

Implications

Obviously, this would be a very time intensive task with little reward – you are interacting with things you do not necessarily enjoy. You lose a lot of valuable and cherishable data, such as your photos, in the process. In addition, you are completely changing your identity and how your friends perceive you. Would they even realize it is you? I am not sure if there is much of a middle ground in using Facebook and it not tracking you. It is a free platform, and its business model is to use your data in exchange for the service. The real questions are: Is it worth it to you? Are you getting enough value from FB to give up your data?

zhack_fb.png

Thanks for your effort on this. The poster is a simple, but straightforward way to begin generating a bit of erraticness in your online profiles. As we discussed in class, what might it look like to make a public statement about the “fuzziness” of your data? Is it a badge or some kind of public/private key kind of thing? How might these social media services react if you publicly announce your obfuscation? How might your friends start to react if your likes/reactions/sharing shows offensive material or political views? Lots to unpack! Also given what we know about shadow profiles (as mentioned in Laura Kalbag’s talk) what other strategies might we also begin trying to obfuscate the profiles from services we aren’t even using?

Late to this feedback 🚋 but this is great, thanks for thinking through some of the fbook tracking; to joey's point above, it could be cool to experiment with alternate profiles, depending on the changes you make, the fallout from your hacking might affect your family and friends on your base profile, and while a little obfuscation could be funny, I could see it getting pretty dark fast if people didn't know what was up with you.