I’ve been seeing many articles about “how to lockdown the privacy on your Facebook profile” after the Cambridge Analytica story. I’ve already done most of what these articles recommend, except I haven’t deleted my “advertising interests.” These “interests” are what Facebook records about users as they interact with the app. My interests ranged from beer (duh), to Progressivism, to the color purple. Facebook say they build these profiles about users to better serve advertising to their interests, but we all know that this is all about collecting as much data about their users as possible to offer to advertisers. I’m not completely against this, but there was a lot of detail about what I liked and disliked (outside of pages I actually clicked “like”), and that kind of creeped me out.
So, this morning I decided to delete every interest point, one-by-one, which was quite the tedious task. There were around 600 different things of “interest to me” and I deleted them all.
Honestly, I enjoy the convenience of Facebook, especially for planning events, using Messenger, and just keeping up with friends. I really don’t want to delete my profile, even though I know my profile exists on Facebook to ultimately allow them to extract data about me for advertisers. I don’t mind giving Facebook some of that data, but it’s a hell of a lot of information they’re giving to advertisers if someone has their privacy settings for everything on Facebook set to default.
Since I stopped making my posts public and un-friending toxic people, Facebook has been OK for me. Would I like an alternative? Sure I would. But, for now, I’m keeping Facebook locked down as much as I can until the time comes where Facebook is no longer relevant, if that time ever comes at all...