What Facebook knows is a result of what you have shared, and done, on Facebook
When we create that first Facebook account and go through the profile creation wizard, we can hardly see 10 feet ahead of us. We get a smorgasbord of questions
- Where and when born?
- Grade school?
- Education achieved?
- High school?’
- College?
- Marital status?
- Spouse name?
- Where you work or have worked?
- Then we get to the most dangerous ones. Get ready:
- Political views
- Religious views.
I wisely answered the dangerous ones. I wrote “Everybody vote for me” and “Everybody worship me.” Wise before my time, I suppose.
Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg monetizes the personal information you shared.
You are the product
I challenge you to look at your profile and see what information you are sharing. Remember Facebook is packaging this and selling it to advertisers. My friend Karl Palachuk says you are the product and he was the first to share that assessment with me. You truly are, especially because you are using Facebook for free.
Look at your profile and see what personal information you surrendered. Ask if you are comfortable with that level of sharing. Also ask how that feeds into the ads you routinely see there. Facebook presented me with an ad for a Michigan State University branded MasterCard. If I had not told Facebook I was an MSU alum, they may have presented me with one from a closer school, such as Sacramento State, University of California at Davis or Berkeley.
You can also request Facebook report to you the information you have shared. Think of this as “You shared this, remember?” Facebook notified us at the start of 2020, when the California Consumer Privacy Act took effect. I accepted Facebook’s offer to download my data and review it. Now that I have, I see what potential clients see when vetting me. Let us all remember, once you put something online, you never know where it will end up.
One of my clients runs 10 beauty salons. He hires teenagers to serve as receptionists and earn minimum wage. The hiring process is no cake walk. The hiring manager receives resumes and then vets candidates online. Yes, you read that right. She googles the candidate’s name and then looks for that candidate online. Facebook is one obvious theater. Others include LinkedIn, Snapchat and Twitter. If a minimum wage receptionist candidate gets vetted online, everybody does.
How Facebook tracks
Facebook tracks the links you click by appending the links. One day. My friend Stephanie Chandler sent me a link via Facebook Messenger. She sent me a link to https://nonfictionauthorsassociation.com/book-editors-recommended-resources. I clicked the link and found https://nonfictionauthorsassociation.com/book-editors-recommended-resources/?fbclid=IwAR3bT5s5HyMYG1JdNh7c2E7YAl_NHSO8ovtXLWJ1XUtvllz_3INPN8lU7qg in the Address bar. This link contained Stephanie’s original link plus a tracking code of IwAR3bT5s5HyMYG1JdNh7c2E7YAl_NHSO8ovtXLWJ1XUtvllz_3INPN8lU7qg. Facebook records I clicked that link and will probably find other interesting pages both at https://nonfictionauthorsassociation.com and at related sites.
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Content from How Hacks Happen and how to protect yourself. Visit https://howhackshappen.com and view three chapters online for FREE today or visit https://www.amazon.com/How-Hacks-Happen-protect-yourself/dp/0983576920/. By Mark Anthony Germanos, of https://cybersafetynet.net/about-cyber-safety-net/.