The ethics behind scientific experimentation are purely good whenever the motivation is either academic or aiming at revealing something unethical and evil.
I'll aim to stand by this statement by demonstrating some tools and techniques that will enable you to claim back your privacy on the Internet. Before the story, you should right away get a grip with Firefox. A browser that does not belong to a corporation, as much as you may like Chrome for being fast or Safari for being kewl, the advertisement blocking policies and possibilities of those browsers are dictated by corporations.
Firefox is the swiss knife of browsers allows you to bypass all sorts of mechanisms that will spam you with advertisements.
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/i-dont-care-about-cookies/
Another nice add-on is this one for extending proxy functions, as Firefox is somewhat limited
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/foxyproxy-standard/
For those of you feeling this is not enough, there is the ultimate option the Tor browser.
Quoting Linux Torvalds, collaboration as a community in today's digital age “makes all of us modern artists”. So let's allow ourselves to adopt new ways of using software, software designed for you to use privately.
Zuckerberg grabbed all this free software, like Linux to build a multi-million new industry by monetizing social advertisement.
That may sound like an oxymoron, someone building a financial empire over a ton of free software...
Perhaps it was megalomania or abuse of the devops principles that lead Facebook to fail not only fast and early but also repetitively.
There are public records of motivational speeches, probably taken out of some early hackathons, where Zuckerberg orients the team to aggressively deliver with the motto of “Move fast and break things”
Agreeing to implement backdoor was one of the things he broke.
The trust of the public would be forever broken when recently it came to light that there exist internal systems allowing anyone in Facebook to read anyone's profile.
They also had carefully invented such a thing as the “Sauron” alert to cover them from internal litigation.
The “Sauron” alert is designed to warn a Facebook employee when his profile is accessed.
Too bad I can't buy this “Sauron” alert feature as a service as a member of the general public accessing that network.
Taken from popular culture, the Eye of Sauron is part of a greater evil taking many forms over time and is of such gargantuan dimensions that it can theoretically see everything by hanging out in the sky.
Well, it's fiction so whatever works for entertainment. In reality that's pretty sickening of a reference for an organization acting as a news platform, and indirect surveillance tool.
Technical people in our industry describe a back door, as a vulnerability voluntarily designed for data access purposes.
Keep in mind that unmasking people's data on Facebook can be done to a small extent using proxies and exploiting vulnerabilities that may not have been understood by the designers of Facebook.
That's due to the customized version of HTML Facebook uses, called surprise surprise FBML to match their almost imperialistic approach having created a monopoly around social networking...
During the Facebook hearings, questions where finally answered The type of backdoor that existed, and where such all-seeing eyes existed in the organization.
Some of the backdoors were designed for PRISM, Facebook being a small subset of data under a greater all seeing eye such that government agencies act as.
During the NSA hearings a few years ago, no public answers were given claiming some conversations were deemed as classified consequently not revealing public how the surveillance model was used.
Zuckerberg was unable to play this card of top-secret conversations.
He turned various shades of pink before his cheeks became totally red when asked how cookies serve marketing purposes collecting the Internet activity He oriented the senator to his technical team seemingly claiming little or no knowledge of the mechanisms.
Similarly when 3rd party applications running on Facebook violated the terms of privacy, and no control or shutdown was enforced on those applications Baffling excuses that to me sounded like :
“My dog ate all the data, not me”
The rhetoric began to sound different as the interrogation was circling him
“It is not really my dog, I found it on the Internet and fed it data.”
And the answers keep getting weirder and weirder.
When questioned around sanctioned for anyone involved in releasing those 3rd party application to the public via Facebook, with an a la carte “all-you-can-eat” data buffet of information, Zuckerberg's voice broke down and froze.
Not being able to produce sounds, after a few seconds of silence the senators got directed to his technical teams for details while Zuckerberg plunged in comfortable silence.
There is no real catch, It's a free market, and anyone patient to read the disclaimers would understand straight away.
What Facebook failed to do is to protect the public from 3rd party application that would have a disclaimer canceling other disclaimers.
Selling data to political campaign advisors via those 3rd party applications surfaced as an unhealthy caveat in Facebook's noble mission to “bring the world together” ...by running the advertisement bots accessed by political organizations.
Admittedly the Trump campaign went the whole nine yards in terms of massive amounts of data collection, using harsh discriminative advertising and swinging the election having successfully discovered a fistful of nihilist citizens that would not have voted at all to vote for him.
The Obama campaign used the same technology, in a slightly lighter fashion finding the next possible voter through the social network, asking a friend that was psychologically conditioned to accept the content shared and susceptible to vote for him
Even when Facebook had the gained knowledge of the Cambridge Analytica breach, via the 3rd party applications they failed to alert the public of that concern.
More important than participating in mass surveillance programs anti-terrorism programs.
Truly the 50.000 people employed as content reviewers by Facebook, have been proven inefficient, as they fail to stop censorship from political bias resulting in pages being taken down for no good reason.
Meanwhile, Internet trolls keep multiplying
New pressure came to light as in the summer of 2018 the FBI asked Facebook to implement a backdoor in their messaging app.
The root cause of this problem ,that enables goverment agencies to collect private data is the centralized nature of the data ,the information exchange model of social networks, as well as their unscrupulous economic models.
Last year just before the revelation of the scandals, I found myself a victim of data representing me, on Facebook out of context with someone's arm leaning over me.
I had not uploaded that data myself and had no possibility to remove it.
That information caused my last relationship to implode.
The data was obsolete and meaningless at the present time but the bias and jealousy generated by that information about my past being available online resulted in hatred.
This incident fueled my interest in finding a decentralized and alternative network such as https://sociall.io/
This is a new type of social media where data is theoretically not for sale considering most of it is based on a peer to peer architecture. It also provides encrypted data.
Which brings me back to my original post, calling out for more encryption.
The decentralized Internet is close to the pure idea of the cyber communication in its early days.
Older efforts like Diaspora https://diasporafoundation.org/ were launched in the past, was set back following the suicide of one of the main developers and founders Ilya Zhitomirskiy.
He died at the age of 22 from helium asphyxiation, during the inception and growth period of what would become the anti-facebook platform in terms of business model and technical transparency.
His surrounding confirmed he was under a great amount of pressure.
Last but not least, for your own experimentation with a cleaner Internet I would prompt you to try out the Freedom box.
https://freedomboxfoundation.org/
It is a simple tool, design to secure data, communications and search strings you may use, host personal blogs bypassing censorship capable of enabling political change.
In our world, everyone has accepted or chose to pretend they don't understand that social networks store data of shadow profiles along with real profiles often giving a skewed perspective of who we are.
Following the new European regulations such as GDPR salty fines were served to Google accounting for 5 billion dollars fine.
The Cambridge Analytica scandal was scrubbed off with a 600k fine Under recent regulations that would have cost them about 2 billion dollars instead.
So next time you share data on such traditional centralized social platform, ask yourself is there a good reason to do it?
For your information, your intellectual property to end in a sea of data lakes
Data lakes are the jargon for king size data-center and yottabytes of Instagram holiday snaps stored in raw format.
Raw data of people posing as some famous Renaissance paintings surrounded by advertising A.I maggots mining information.
Once those maggots are ready to breed they infest your cookies, and keep coming like spam egg bacon spam and oh you know the drill by now.
Your computers and smartphone micro-probe your life moments in the name of marketing. Originally cookies were designed to solve a problem, such as remembering data within a website to make navigation easier.
3rd party cookies typically can act across sites, when operated by advertising networks, that track habits.
Deleting cookies will never be enough, so why not make the problem disappear and surf the internet differently without being monetized on your every click.
Think before you post.
Will you provide information useful to the community, or will you become information for sale yourself?
The lack of purity and integrity that governs social media, cost a second dive in terms of IPO and stock market value
With no control over Myanmar's hate speech outbreak on Facebook where the Buddhists were made life threats to the Muslim community, as well as citing Hitler as a solution to their problems.
Facebook, a global corporation had only one Burmese speaker working for them back in 2014, at some stage none, then two.
They now employ more than sixty with most of them based in the Dublin headquarters, the situation is still way out of hands in terms of hate speech in Myanmar.
There are 18 million active Facebook users in Myanmar out of a population of 50 million. The effort put to stop the haters using a handful of people is meager effort from such a renowned multi-million dollar marketing business offering to “connect the world”.
Accenture also got hired as a subcontractor in Kuala Lumpur to keep the costs low enough to fight hate speech based simply on reports as there is are not enough resources to control such hate speech.
Why? Simply because Facebook is the only form of the Internet known to the local population and its lack of filters perhaps the only solution for the local Muslim community of Myanmar is to use the deep web and onion routers to keep their anonymity and subsequently their lives.
Stopping them is not a task for humans, this requires automation and artificial intelligence which allegedly has been introduced after the scandals surfaced.
AI is effective against the propaganda that Daesh is posting detecting 94% of it with an accuracy of 99.995 %, within Facebook.
It catches 98% of the porno or nudity on Facebook.
Yet Zuckerberg claimed he would not use A.I to detect hate speech unless it was 99% reliable. That is a double standard.
Sure, the data patterns in linguistic nuances to identify hate speech will make the algorithm matching them less efficient.
It's not a good enough excuse not to use A.I to prevent hate speech when you are happy enough to filter all the porn that is bad for the digital marketing trade.
The Berkeley University has created a machine learning system people can use a reference data source.
That's found on https://www.adl.org
The United Nations, in September 2018 described Facebook as having enabled and facilitated the unrest and rising tensions in leading to loss of life of the Rohingya people.
Stalked to death.