How to Stop Companies From Collecting and Selling Your Facebook Info

How to Stop Companies From Collecting and Selling Your Facebook Info

If you want to keep a secret, don’t put any trace of it online.
That’s something ex-CIA director David Petraeus just learned the hard
way. But our lives are increasingly digital, and the government
recognizes it.

In July, Congress asked nine data brokerage firms – including credit
reporting agencies – what consumer information they collect, how they do
it, and whether they sell it to third parties. On Nov. 8, it released
those companies’ responses.

You can read the lengthy original letters and the responses here, but
investigative journalism site ProPublica sums things up nicely in their
article Yes, Companies Are Harvesting – and Selling – Your Facebook
Profile:
Data companies of course, do not stop with the
information on Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn. Intelius, which offers
everything from a reverse phone number look up to an employee screening
service, said it also collects information from Blogspot, WordPress,
MySpace, and YouTube.

This information includes individual email addresses and screen
names, web site addresses, interests, and professional history, Intelius
said. It offers a “Social Network Search” on its website that allows
you to enter someone’s name and see a record of social media URLs for
that person.
And that’s just the start. Companies like Acxiom
collect likes, shares, and recommendations to build out a profile of
consumers on behalf of their clients – something they say benefits
consumers. (In return for our data, they say, we get cheap or free
access to services like Facebook and more relevant advertising.) In its
response to Congress, Acxiom [PDF] said its clients in 2009 included the following…

• 47 Fortune 100 clients
  
• 8 of the top 10 credit card issuers
  
• 4 of the top 5 retail banks
  
• 7 of the top 10 telecom/media companies
  
• 5 of the top 10 retailers
  
• 7 of the top 10 automotive manufacturers
  
• 3 of the top 10 brokerage firms
  
• 6 of the top 10 technology companies
  
• 3 of the top 5 pharmaceutical manufacturers
  
• 4 of the top 10 life/health insurance providers
  
• 7 of the top 10 property and casualty insurers
  
• 7 of the top 10 lodging companies
  
• 3 of the top 5 domestic airlines
  
• 6 of the top 10 U.S. hotels
  
• 4 of the top 5 gaming companies
  
• 5 of the 13 largest U.S. federal government agencies
  
• Both major national political parties
  

Just how much are we worth to these companies? And is there anything we can do about how they get and use our info?

Fixing your privacy settings


The answer to both questions might come from a relatively new tool (released last month) called Privacyfix.
It’s a browser plug-in for Firefox and Chrome that analyzes your
privacy settings across data-rich social networking sites like Google
and Facebook, and any other websites you’ve visited.

When you first install it, you’ll be greeted with a page that tells
you what percentage of sites you’ve visited Facebook tracks (for me, 86
percent) and an estimate of how much you’re worth to Facebook per year
(just $3.32 here – sorry, Zuckerberg).

Along the right side, you’ll see a number of settings you can “fix,”
and each will be explained as you move your cursor over it. These
include excluding your Facebook profile from search engine results,
blocking your friends from inadvertently sharing your personal
information, making your postings private (visible only to friends) by
default, and so on. Clicking on any of these will take you step-by-step
through the process, explaining why you would want to change the setting
and what the potential downside is. You don’t have to “fix” anything
you don’t want to, and you can always undo the changes.

When you’re ready to go to the next section, you’ll see a blue “next”
button below the right-side column of Facebook issues you can fix. Or,
in a bar along the top, you can skip to whatever section you want.

You’ll go through similar Google settings next. (Google tracks data
on 37 percent of websites I visit and makes around $1,174 per year from
ads at my activity level.) Then, you’ll move on to a list of other
websites you’ve visited, categorized by icon into “Websites sharing
data” and “Websites with other issues.”

The fix button here lets you automatically generate an email letter
requesting the removal of your personal information on every site you
specify. Meanwhile, moving your cursor over any icon shows you the
particular problems with that site – for instance, whether it shares
information with third parties, whether it notifies you about it, and
whether it is known to honor deletion requests.

Just because a website’s icon is on the list doesn’t mean it’s bad:
Many of mine say “personal data is not generally shared” and “deletion
requests are honored” with green checkmarks, and usually the only red
caution mark is next to “no assurance of notice if data is requested.”
But if that data is not shared, I’m not too concerned about hypothetical
notices.

Next you’ll go to a page on cookies, tiny files stored on your
computer that can keep you logged into sites, save your preferences,
store passwords, or do what Privacyfix is worried about: track you. The
tool can help you delete these cookies in a snap.

It can also help you block them from tracking you in the future.
However, this fix involves using a signal called Do Not Track, which may
cause some websites to not load correctly, or sometimes at all. It took
me a while to realize this was the culprit, so I wouldn’t recommend
turning the feature on unless you’re sure to remember it can cause
problems. (Some also argue
that enabling Do Not Track will cut into advertising revenue sites
depend on to operate, and ultimately make them charge users or put them
out of business.)

The last section of Privacyfix is Healthbar. Enabling it will add an
icon to the top of your browser which you can click to access a
dashboard which can quickly check a website’s privacy flaws, delete
cookies, provide a history of privacy concerns (on Facebook, it points
to data exposures and a government settlement over privacy promises), or
fiddle with any of the settings you previously adjusted. The color of
the icon will change depending on the relative privacy of the website –
sites Privacyfix thinks handle your info smartly will be marked green,
while riskier sites will turn the icon partially or completely orange.

Privacyfix isn’t doing much savvy computer users can’t do themselves,
but it is making complicated privacy issues a lot simpler to navigate
for the rest of us. Even if you’ve tried to figure out Facebook’s crazy
privacy options on your own, you might find this exercise eye-opening – I
sure did.


Source:-
http://finance.yahoo.com/news/stop-companies-collecting-selling-facebook-105019611.html