Facebook Privacy Alert! You have to fight for your privacy or you lose it

Think about privacy in real life. Would you allow any stranger to enter your house without knowing anything about him? No right, then why allow an unknown person to view your digital life?

Facebook has taken several measures to protect your data, but before going to the privacy measures, let us see what make users show extent concern for their privacy through an instance of the recent scandal. Recently, a social media giant, Facebook has announced that it is redesigning its Privacy settings with more secure and user-friendly features.

Privacy measures were taken by Facebook to protect users data

 Redesigning the security settings page

Facebook security page has got a cool makeover with a visually engaging image that will make the page more simple user-friendly. Instead of having setting options spread across multiple modules, they are now accessible on a single module.

Privacy shortcuts

This new feature is a menu where you can manage your data in just a few taps. With clear and proper explanations of how Facebook’s tools work. The experience is now clearer, more visual, and easy-to-find.

From the new privacy shortcut menu, a user can manage the following settings.

Secure your account

The feature, “Two-factor authentication”, originally named “login approvals, facilitates the user to secure their account. By enabling this option, the user gets access to view, in how many devices their account is logged-in, under “Where you are logged in” option. Additionally,  you can also view, location and login date and time for each place you are logged in. 

If an unknown person tries to access user account from a remote device, Facebook will send a notification which includes login code that alerts the user.

Also Read – Two Trending and Latest updates of Facebook you should never miss!

Control your personal information

Safety is in your hands. You should decide to whom you want to share your data such as who sees your posts, friends list, photos and many more. You can manage your account setting and protect your personal information. For instance, if you don’t wish to share your profile information with unknown people, you can just manage it by selecting “only friends”  option in your profile settings.

Access your information – Download and delete your Facebook data 

Facebook made it easier to download the data you post. This includes photos you have uploaded, contacts you have added to your account, posts on your timeline, and many more.

Facebook’s “Access your information” feature, provides access to users by managing their information, such as posts, reactions, comments, groups you joined, events and many more. Moreover, you can go here and delete anything from your timeline. Also you can edit/delet profile you have posted in the past and no longer want it on Facebook.

Reasons behind Facebook’s quick update of Privacy Setting

During March 2018, Facebook’s users were experiencing unexpected activities with their Facebook accounts – And a news rolls out that a US company, called Cambridge Analytica has harvested the data Facebook users.

Interesting to know further? Browse below!

Cambridge Analytica (CA) is a British political consulting company, started in 2013 by Robert Mercer. The company performs data mining, data brokerage, and data analysis for the electoral process. Its branches are located in London, New York City, and Washington, D.C.

So, now the questions arise, how is Facebook connected to Cambridge Analytica?

In the year 2014, Dr. Aleksandr Kogan, a professor at Cambridge University was paid $8000,000 by Cambridge Analytica, to develop an application named “Thisisyourdigitallife” to collect data from Facebook users. Similar to some gaming application like candy crush and clash of clans, this 3rd party application was running with Facebook credentials. However, the app was downloaded by 270,000 people. This simply means that they granted permission for data collection. And this is how data extraction happens. Data including location, e-mail id, interests.  Apart from these, he also collected data from profiles of their Facebook friends without their knowledge.

Later, Kogan passed all the collected data to Cambridge Analytica. Further, the data was used for political advertisements, for a group of individuals whose liking and interests were already known to them. Cambridge Analytics performed a variety of services to influence people on the election to support Trump. And this way Cambridge Analytica was successful in stealing data.

After an investigation, Facebook claimed that it removed the app in 2015 when the violation of rules was noticed for the first time. However, Facebook was not at fault, people shared their data by their choice by enabling the setting over the app. Moreover, without user’s will, it’s quite unjustifiable to say that Facebook is the sole reason behind such confidential leak.

This incident leads to privacy concern for huge users, Facebook finally responded towards users concern on privacy protection.

My take is, privacy is precious. I think privacy is the last true luxury. To be able to live your life as you choose without having everyone comment on it or know about.

You own your data, Make sure you handle well. Think twice before clicking on any third-party app with Facebook credentials. Let’s wait and watch, in future how Facebook will succeed 100% in protecting user’s data.

Be alert! surf smart!

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