Commentary: Way back in 1992, one of my college professors told the class about getting a phone call from a political pollster.
That was 12 years before Facebook launched. Cell phones existed, but they were just phones. My large, heavy computer ran on Windows 3.0, and I saved my schoolwork on floppy disks.
“For whom are you collecting this information?” my professor said he asked the pollster, “And what’s my cut?”
The pollster confirmed that he worked for a data collection service, but wondered why my professor should be paid.
A patient man, my professor explained it to him: “You want me to give you information, for free, that you are going to sell to somebody. I’m not telling you anything.”
It had not occurred to us to look at it that way. If someone telephoned us, called us sir or ma’am, and assured us they weren’t selling anything but were interested in our opinions, many of us would have gladly obliged, perhaps even thinking our input might make a difference somehow, not considering that our responses were a valued commodity we were donating gratis.
That’s the game: figuring out how to sell merchandise you get for free, snookering people who do not understand that the information they happily give up is a product sold for money.
That memory of my professor came to mind this month while Facebook, the social media behemoth with over 2 billion users, was scrambling to do damage control after the Cambridge Analytica scandal broke.
Cambridge Analytica is the data analysis company that took advantage of Facebook’s open platform on which developers can build applications that harvest data from our profiles. This data can be monetized in numerous ways. In the case of Cambridge Analytica, misappropriated data from over 50 million user profiles was used to generate psychological profiles of users and influence their behavior. Donald Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign purchased that data.
What’s important to remember, however, is that the information was not stolen. It was freely given by users of Facebook apps, who happily fill their profiles with personal information useful to marketers and advertisers. We have even been trained to report our whereabouts at all times by “checking in” to places we visit on Yelp and similar apps.
Cambridge Analytica violated its agreement with Facebook but they did not pilfer anything that hadn’t been freely given by millions of people.
We are trained to throw around information about ourselves by swiping loyalty cards, signing onto various websites using our Facebook account, “liking” and “sharing,” and taking lots and lots of personality quizzes. O Hermes! How we love to answer personal questions and be judged by some algorithm that tells us what J.R.R. Tolkien character, what flavor of ice cream, or what species of moth we are.
Then we share it with all our online “friends.” Look, I’m a Metallarcha leucodetis! Take the quiz and share your results! How foolishly we play into the hands of these hustlers.
You don’t have to delete your Facebook account, although there are excellent reasons to do exactly that.
You may yet find Facebook a useful tool, perhaps for exploring Socratic dialogue on the ambiguity of language with some guy you dimly remember from high school, or for finding interesting articles that consider politics from a dispassionate and rational perspective, or for inspiring videos of dogs that can operate Keurig coffeemakers.
If that is the case, treat your personal data like the commodity it is. It's impossible to use the internet without surrendering some data, but you don't have to disclose everything voluntarily. Demand your cut.
Algernon D’Ammassa writes the “Desert Sage” column for the Deming Headlight and Las Cruces Sun News. Share your thoughts at adammassa@demingheadlight.com.