So my mom called me on Tuesday night asking if she needed to "get off the Facebook" because of something she saw on the news. That's usually a sign a tech story has gone fully mainstream — when your mom is asking about it instead of the other way around. By now everybody's seen the headlines about Cambridge Analytica scraping data off something like 50 million Facebook profiles through a quiz app back in 2014, and Zuckerberg finally put out a statement yesterday after days of radio silence, which, cool, thanks for getting back to us.
I'm not going to do the whole "here's what Cambridge Analytica is and why it matters" post because if you're reading a tech blog in March 2018 you already know, and there are about four hundred other places explaining the org chart of who-worked-for-who. What I actually spent my evening doing instead was going through my own Facebook settings, because I realized I genuinely had no idea what I'd authorized over the past decade. Figured I'd write up what I found, since it's a mess and most people aren't going to bother.
Start with Apps and Websites
Settings > Apps and Websites. I had 63 apps connected. Sixty-three. Half of them I didn't recognize at all: some quiz thing from 2013, a Spotify integration I stopped using in 2015, a random "which Disney princess are you" app that I am not proud of. Each one of these had, at some point, permission to pull your friend list, your likes, sometimes your photos. That's the exact mechanism Cambridge Analytica used. It wasn't a hack, it was just an app doing what apps were allowed to do. Facebook shut off the friends-list-scraping loophole back in 2015, but anything that grabbed data before then already has it, sitting on someone's server, forever probably.
Go through the list and revoke anything you don't use weekly. It takes maybe ten minutes and it's oddly satisfying, like cleaning out a junk drawer.
Download Your Information
There's an option buried in Settings > General called "Download a copy of your Facebook data." Do this. Mine took about twenty minutes to generate and the zip file was bigger than I expected: every message since 2011, every login location, every ad topic they'd tagged me with. There's a folder in there called "ads" that lists interest categories advertisers can target you by. Mine included things like "cooking," fine, but also some categorized political stuff I never remember opting into. That's the part that got me more than the CA story honestly, just seeing it laid out in a folder on my own desktop.
The stuff that actually matters more than deleting your account
Everyone's doing the dramatic #DeleteFacebook thing this week and I get the impulse, WhatsApp's own cofounder tweeted it out over the weekend, which is a hell of a thing coming from a guy who sold his company to Facebook for 19 billion dollars. But deleting the app doesn't do anything about the data already collected, and most people aren't actually going to quit. I'm not going to pretend I am, my extended family coordinates literally everything through a Facebook group. What's more useful is going into your Ad Preferences page and clearing out the interest categories, turning off "ads based on data from partners," and locking your profile visibility down to Friends Only instead of Public, which a shocking number of people still have set to Public by default from whenever they signed up.
One more thing while I'm in here complaining: the settings menu itself is genuinely bad. It's spread across like six different sub-pages with inconsistent naming, and half the privacy controls are one menu removed from where you'd expect them. I don't think that's an accident exactly, but I also don't think it's some grand conspiracy — it's just what happens when a product adds features for a decade without anyone going back to clean up the UX. Companies never want to prioritize that work because it doesn't move any metric anyone gets promoted for.
Anyway. Ten minutes, Apps and Websites page, Ad Preferences, download your archive at least once so you know what's actually in there. It won't fix the internet but it's better than doing nothing while you wait for the outrage cycle to move on to whatever's next.