You may know that Facebook is in the midst of changing its privacy settings…again. As usual, Facebook is not offering its users any way to opt out of these changes. They simply say, “If you use Facebook, you accept our rules”. Here’s what you may have seen as a notice on Facebook:
Once you click on the notice, you’re taken to a page of lies, essentially. Facebook tells you that they’re doing this all for you, that their changes will make your Facebook experience better. In reality, the changes make Facebook a better choice for advertisers. How? Because Facebook will be following you around as you surf the Internet, keeping track of virtually everything you do in order to send your demographics back to head office. Once Facebook gets a big enough picture of your likes, your searches, the pages you regularly use, etc., they will sell your information to advertisers in the form of a profile. Advertisers can then tune their ads to the correct demographic, the right people for their products(s).
Some of you may actually enjoy this personalization. Others, including us here at Computers Made Simple, see this as a threat to our privacy. Facebook isn’t the only culprit here. Google does the same thing. Everything you do on Google, specially if you use Chrome, is fed back to head office, decimated and recorded then fed to the advertisers. There are other web sites that do much the same thing, Amazon for one.
Over the next few posts we’re going to help you remain anonymous, to some extent anyway, on the Internet. We’ll do this by describing the processes that are used to track you, not heavy tech stuff though so don’t be afraid of what’s coming. Then we will describe alternative browsers and tools that you can use to mask your Internet use. We will also dissect Facebook’s new Terms of Service and explain what you can do to opt out of being a guinea pig in their ever-changing experiments to make more money.
Stay tuned! Happy Thanksgiving to our American readers.
Comments and questions are welcome but Likes on our Facebook page get immediate attention. Here’s the link:
Computers Made Simple on Facebook