Facebook and Privacy, and Ongoing Discussion

If you are even vaguely aware of the concept of social media, you have heard of Facebook.

Facebook requires that users be who they say they are, which allows them to remove suspicious users and fake accounts, but that has not completely stemmed the tide of fake news, violence, and hate speech that has been one of the more controversial aspects of the site.

The other major controversy stems from privacy and issues and concerns and scandals, where Facebook has made the supposedly private data of users available to advertisers and analysts.

Despite these issues, Facebook does have the potential to be a force for good, allowing people to remain in contact across distances in a manner that was unimaginable a half century ago.

If you want to understand how to make your online presence more secure and more private, you need to understand the basics of how companies collect and collate your data in the first place.

When you log into Facebook, your login credentials require your email address. This email address is your unique identifier.

How do companies use this to collect information? Because this email address is associated only with you, every time this email address appears in an advertiser database, it can be directly linked your Facebook account. So if you use the same email address for everything, all data you have shared with each of those companies could become aggregated into a single file.

Think about that for a minute.

If you use a single email address, every single company you have given that address to could link the information you have given them to every other company that has been given the same address.

But here’s the thing: if you create an email address you ONLY use for Facebook, it cannot confidently link that information to any data you have with any other company; you’ve broken that link.

There are plenty of other steps you can take to further isolate Facebook, and many of them are relatively simple. (Browser Privacy Add-Ons) But using different email addresses for different kinds of online services helps create walls between all those accounts.

For further information please read this bit on the OLLI website on Facebook privacy.
For more inforamtion on creating and using multiple email addreses, please check our Technology Security handout (pages 9 and 29)