Logged into Facebook yesterday morning, coffee not even finished, and there's this banner sitting at the top of my feed above the usual garbage about somebody's cousin's engagement photos. "Protecting Your Information." Little link that says "See More." I almost scrolled past it the way I scroll past literally everything else Facebook puts up there, but something made me click.
Turns out I was one of the affected accounts. Not because I ever touched that quiz app myself — I'm pretty sure I never installed "thisisyourdigitallife" or whatever it was called, the Kogan personality quiz thing that started this whole mess. But a friend of mine did, years ago, back when quizzes telling you which Game of Thrones house you belonged to were unavoidable, and back then the Facebook API just handed over your friends' data along with your own. So congratulations to me, I guess. My name, my "likes," probably my hometown and employer, all scooped up because somebody I know once wanted to find out if she was more Tyrion or more Cersei.
I want to be clear I'm not shocked by this. Anybody who was paying attention to how Facebook's platform worked before 2015 already knew this was the deal. What got me was seeing it confirmed in black and white with my own name attached, instead of it being some abstract "87 million users" number in a headline. It's a different feeling entirely. Abstract numbers you can shrug at. A little box that says "your account, specifically" is harder to shrug at, even at 7am with bad coffee.
So I did the responsible thing and went and looked at my app permissions, which I should honestly do about twice a year and never do. Found eleven apps I had no memory of authorizing. Eleven. A couple of old game things, something called "Compatibility Test" that I have zero recollection of ever clicking, and a running app I stopped using in 2014 that apparently still has standing permission to see my friend list. Revoked all of them. Took maybe four minutes total. If you haven't done this yet, go do it now, don't wait for a headline to shame you into it — Settings, then Apps, then just start clicking the little trash icons.
Here's my actual complaint, the one nobody seems to be making loudly enough: the notice itself barely tells you anything useful. It says whether you were affected in the vaguest terms possible and then basically nudges you toward the same settings page you could've found on your own two years ago. There's no real accounting of what specifically got pulled, no way to see the actual fields, nothing. It reads like a document written by six lawyers and one PR person who won the argument every time. I don't think that's an accident.
I know today's the big day, Zuckerberg's up on Capitol Hill getting grilled by senators who, if the pre-hearing clips floating around are any indication, mostly don't understand how any of this technology works well enough to ask a follow-up question. I'm sure it'll be everywhere by tonight, and I'm sure half my feed will be quoting whatever the most awkward thirty-second clip turns out to be. I probably won't watch it live. I've got actual work to do and a testimony that's mostly going to be a man in a suit repeating "senator, we're committed to" forty different ways isn't exactly appointment viewing for me. Maybe I'll catch the highlights later, over dinner, the way you catch a rerun of a show you weren't that invested in to begin with.
What I'd rather see, and what I doubt is coming out of today's hearing, is some actual teeth behind whatever apology tour this turns into. A notice at the top of my feed is nice. A real audit trail of what got taken and where it went would be nicer. Until that exists I'm just going to keep quietly deleting apps I forgot I ever granted access to, one lazy Sunday at a time, and assuming that whatever's already out there is already out there for good. That part, unfortunately, doesn't get undone by a banner.