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24-Year-Old Asks Facebook For His Data, Gets 1,200 PDFs
chicksdaddy writes "Be careful of what you ask for. That's a lesson Max Schrems of Vienna, Austria learned the hard way when he sent a formal request to Facebook for a copy of every piece of personal information that the social network had collected on him, as required under European law. After a wait, the 24-year-old law student got what he was seeking: a CD with all his data stored on it — 1,222 files in all. The collection of PDFs was roughly the length of Leo Tolstoy's War and Peace, but told a more mundane story: a record of Schrems' years-long relationship with the world's largest social network, including reams of data he had deleted. Now Schrems is pushing Facebook to disclose even more of what it knows."
I've worked for a number of tech companies that dont actually delete anything, the simply mark the record "deleted" in the database. It's a pretty common practice that didn't really ever get talked about until it came to light that Facebook did it. Let's face it, once something is out there, it never ever really goes away, whether it be on Facebook or somewhere else,
Reliably? Yes. Sure, it's easy to delete the copy in the production database. It's harder to prove that if the disks backing the production database were stolen and analyzed, it would be impossible to recover the data. It's harder still to locate and redact every backup of the database that contains the data. (It's even harder still to prove that a copy of the data doesn't persist on another user's hard drive as a result of having viewed the data in a web browser.)
This is the Cloud Era; you can't reliably delete data any more.
And if your life was any interest to anyone, there'd be people working a lot harder to penetrate your privacy.
You're trying to look at an elephant through a microscope. The danger isn't the violation of any one person's privacy. The danger is the emergence of a kind of "total information awareness," where inferences can be drawn on larger social scales. For instance, detecting when a protest is about to materialize, measuring the effectiveness of propaganda techniques, tracking politically unfavorable trends in conversations, etc.
I'm not in principle opposed to the ability to do that, but right now the ability is very one sided. Facebook (as well as any government who can order them to do things) has all the information. We don't.