The Costly Lesson From Facebook’s Latest Scandal

By Matthew Carr

I see the posts in my Facebook (Nasdaq: FB) timeline and cringe…

Jane took the quiz and got “Grumpy!” Find out which of Snow White’s seven dwarves you are!

What’s your elf name? Comment below using the first letter of your first name and your birthday month!

Find out which Pokémon you most resemble by uploading your profile picture!

These little tests and quizzes seem harmless… but they’re not.

Many ask to access your personal information through your Facebook profile. And just like any virus, they can easily spread from one person to the next.

Silly, stupid quizzes are just as effective as any phishing scam. They’re dangerous and make you give up access to a lot of information for an insignificant payout. Did you really need third-party confirmation to know your profile picture most resembles Sleepy or Snorlax?

For years, social media users have feverishly taken these quizzes. I have one friend who seems to take a new one every day.

Police departments even warned that these quizzes could steal your personal data.

But nobody listened.

Until now…

Suddenly, the Cambridge Analytica incident has brought this back out into the open. As many as 50 million people had their profile data misused by the U.K. firm.

And millions of users and businesses are deleting their Facebook accounts in protest.

I listened to a commentator on television this morning express outrage over how much data Facebook collects and how much data these quizzes have access to.

They obviously didn’t read the user agreements.

But this backlash has sent shares of the tech giant careening lower…

And I do believe this will begin the march toward regulation of social media companies… in some form or another.

But this goes back to a problem I’ve discussed here before – people are ultimately the biggest threat to their own security.

As computers and the digital world have become a more integral part of our everyday lives, they’ve caused us to take a step backward.

We’ve devolved.

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We’re in an age of complacency, and seemingly no amount of security breaches will change our behavior.

And instead of being skeptical or protective of our personal data, we’re willy-nilly with what information we expose, where we broadcast it – and how.

That should frighten you.

Because there are industries – like social media – built on accessing our digital breadcrumbs and selling them.

Every moment of every day, you’re emitting a constant stream of data. The technical term for this is “data exhaust.”

As you move through both the real and digital world, you leave this trail of information particulate in your wake.

This includes text messages, social media posts and alerts, check-ins at various locations, as well as simple GPS “pings” from your smartphone and other mobile devices. Popular apps like Uber, Lyft and even Facebook can access your location.

It’s the byproduct of our modern world.

And here’s the deal… Data exhaust is even bigger than “big data.” More importantly, this is part of the reason why the massive amount of data humans produce is increasing so rapidly.

I mean, consider for a moment that from the dawn of human …read more

Source:: Investment You

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