Facebook is the Privacy Villain of the Year

Every year at the Big Brother Awards, a company is chosen as the “big brother” company. It specifically includes companies which are notorious for violating the privacy of its users.

The Big Brother Awards were named after a famous character,

“Every year a person, an enterprise, a government agency or a measure is awarded the “prestigious” Big Brother Award. This award is named after the character in George Orwell’s novel Nineteen Eighty-Four (1984).”

This year the Big Brother Awards 2016 at Belgium, Facebook received the award of being the worst of the worst in terms of privacy regulations. The jury unanimously agreed on Facebook to be given this award. The public also voted Facebook as the prime privacy violation culprit among other companies, and received the most votes.

You are tracked by default on Facebook

Facebook logs all of your data and movements across the social networking website. You may have received suggestions for people you have talked about but never actually met. This may occur if your phone is with you with the Facebook app installed. On top of logging all of your information it sells that information to all sorts of different companies. It does this without your consent as well and its default settings are configured to allow this.

No easy way to turn it off

To turn off tracking and selling of your personal info on Facebook, you are required to go through complex settings and options. Joe McNamee, Executive Director of European Digital Rights, says,

“We nominated Facebook for the award because their default settings are noxious for privacy. To understand what privacy you are giving away when you use Facebook… well, that is impossible. Data algorithms that can make new assumptions about users are being constantly developed – even Facebook today would have difficulty knowing how they will use your data tomorrow.”

You can head over here to stop Facebook from going through your browser history. You can also head to this page to stop Facebook from tracking your movements.

Via EDRi

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