Since June the 26th, 2024, Facebook has used your personal data to feed its artificial intelligence large language (AI LLM) model. Think OpenAI/ChatGPT or Gemini, just vastly more 'evil'. Facebook made this announcement somewhat under the radar and added it to their vague terms of service in legal-speak, somewhere in June 2024.
Despite a public outcry and Facebook trying to calm the dumb peasants, Meta is pushing ahead with training its AI model using data users posted on Meta's platforms. This will soon include all Meta's services: Facebook, Instagram, Threads, and WhatsApp.
Oh, but WhatsApp's messages are encrypted; only you and the recipient can see them? Not exactly. Messages can still be intercepted just before it get encrypted by the app itself. The founder of WhatsApp initially stayed on with WhatsApp after it was bought out by Facebook. However, he left after it was revealed that Facebook wants the encryption algorithm to be weakened in order for Facebook to have access to sent messages. What is that telling you about the sense of morality and ethics at Facebook/Meta? You're the disposable product; they don't care about you!
The Orwellian mother company Meta, with its shady reputation for dealing with users' private data, will thus place very personal data into an artificial intelligence framework. This will make it impossible for you to ever escape the clutches of the monster mankind created. This personal data includes the hot Facebook Messenger DM's you sent to a romantic partner or financial stuff you discussed with someone.
Everything about users, including personal and private data, will be analyzed by mankind's most advanced technology, with you as their guinea pig. Even your writing style, your political stance, how you feel about certain issues, etc. This means that when a potential employer or new romantic interest looks you up, they'll get a more 'accurate' picture of you, which may actually be wildly skewed. It's one thing for an interested party to see one post you made about a controversial topic, but another when advanced algorithms analyze and dissect the 20 posts you made over five years about the topic.
Every time you do a search on an AI model like ChatGPT, Gemini, or Bing, that LLM is learning more about you too. You did notice that you have to open an account with these sites first before you can use it, right? An innocent search like "Hi Gemini, my phone keeps freezing, are updates for the iPhone XX still available?" gives AI another valuable snippet of information about you. Should you 'google' yourself in the future - or a hacker certainly will - the AI model may reveal what phone and/or operating system you use. This information may be of little significance to ordinary people, but it is vital for a hacker zooming in on a target to know what devices you use and what operating systems it has.
Make no mistake, I personally love AI and use it extensively every day for research. I just don't want my personal data in the hands of an AI model that may give it on purpose or by accident to other users of AI. It is the ultimate erosion—no, destruction—of privacy. Microsoft, Yahoo, Google, Apple, and every other big data company had data leaks in the recent past, and AI makes it even easier for hackers to get users' data. Stories are rife of how hackers fooled AI with clever prompts to get hold of certain data and even to write hacking scripts. Ideally, none of your information should be in any database out there.
Oh, but you're using an email you opened for Facebook only? And you gave a fake name, a fake age and more fake info to Facebook? Yeah, that's not fooling Facebook.
FB gets your phone number, IMEI, and IP from your service provider every time you're on their site, and even just once was all they needed.
For years, Facebook has been buying the credit records of hundreds of millions of its users from credit bureaus, claiming it helps them serve advertisements more accurately. So while you think your fake name on Facebook pulls wool over their eyes, they just run your phone number through the database they got from credit bureaus to know who you really are.
Add to this the many websites you visited and FB's 'share' button on there knowing you were there, and how long you spent on each site. That tells them what you're interested in, and it may be interpreted the wrong way.
For example, you may have done research on school shooters in the USA for whatever reason, like being a blogger or helping a child with a school task or making a video about it, etc. But those searches may trigger an alert, and before you know it you end up on a government watch list. And we know they're not going to take you off quickly. This, in turn, may impact your ability to get a loan from a bank or good insurance premiums, or your boss may even receive an anonymous tip-off and halt your coming promotion.
Your phone's permission system allows apps only access to certain parts, like storage, camera and microphone, geolocation, and so on. But I found that Facebook's apps do not respect that permission system. I disabled the option that the app should send me notifications, but just a day later, the notifications started popping up again. Then I checked the permission button in my phone's settings, and sometimes it was on, other times it was still off. Toggling it off again, and notifications stopped... for a day or two before it started all over again. That's why I am not using any of Meta's apps and don't have an account with them anymore.
Plus, did you know that apps on your phone have free access to your clipboard? That means that every app can see all the passwords and login details of your accounts that you copied to paste elsewhere, and whatever else you copied. Malicious apps do indeed grab that and send it out to their servers when you connect to the internet again. Every now and then, Google Play Store has to remove a few such popular apps.
Thanks to the questionable ethics of companies like Meta, all of that very personal treasure trove of your data now ends up totally out of your control, forever, inside various large language models with incredible, dangerous potential to be used against you in future. Data centers already draw an astonishing quantity of the world's energy sources, and that's set to increase as AI continues to grow hand over foot. The world's new goldmine is data—user data—and companies are mining hard for it.
While we as users try to stay on top of AI, many companies try to stay on top of us.
You never signed up for such a massive, ultimate invasion of your privacy and theft of your data. And now you are locked in, in a 'walled garden', because all your friends and family are on FB and none of you can take your data out and away from FB. Even your most personal messages to others may, by a glitch in their software or on purpose, get into the public domain soon. Go check your inbox on Facebook, do you really want those messages for everyone to see?
What's the solution? Simple: Start taking your online privacy way more seriously. Stop giving data to Big Tech. Break the massive leverage and control they have over you. Sign up at any of the many alternatives to Facebook, and ditch the latter.
There's way too many security and privacy measures one needs to take for me to type it all out here. Ditching closed-source operating systems like Windows in favor of Linux is another brilliant move.
Governments - being snoops themselves; for politicians it is all about control and leverage - are pretty lax and behind the times in keeping up with technology. You cannot rely on them to keep your data safe. A politician knows more about fabricating lies to voters than about tech, and he is more concerned about protecting his salary check and staying in the good books of Big Tech, which funds election campaigns, than about us minions.
For the past two years I've been making a list of social media sites and reviewing them, and I should probably start blogging about it. It is an extensive list of 200+ sites by now, with many notes strewn all over my computer. So keep an eye on this blog, search for my newsletter and subscribe, or add the blog to your RSS feed, so you'll stay updated. Social media is important if you want to become rich - the overall goal of this blog - because that's where people hang out, they are potential customers that want to get to know you. A business-minded individual without a social media portfolio just won't succeed, but that does not mean you have to sacrifice your personal data to corporations.
