The Latest in Facebook Abandonment: Poisoning Your Data First

Facebook practices involving our personal information has really been taking a hit the past few weeks.  We've written about some tips to keep your information more private by deleting connected apps and changing permissions to apps.

But if you are still uneasy about Facebook and are ready to join the #DeleteFacebook movement, there's on more thing suggested that you can do to prevent further encroachment on your information: poison your data before deleting your profile.

This tip comes from Motherboard.com and Vice.com with the final result of manipulating the data you currently have to make any data collected inaccurate and, essentially, unusable.

A small web developer by the name of Kevin Matthew developed a code that replaces current posts with "randomly-generated nonsense".  According to the Motherboard/Vice article:

With a little coding know-how, you could use this script to repeatedly mangle all your Facebook posts over a period of several months, to make the bulk of Facebook’s data on you virtually unusable (though it doesn’t do anything for the data that’s already been scraped by third-parties, like the kind Cambridge Analytica allegedly gained access to).

The article goes on to say that this is an idea but may violate Facebook rules, so do at your own risk.  Also, it's hard to tell how far back Facebook has been collecting information about you, so, that's out of your control but you can try altering it starting now for the next few months with the idea that data could be altered to be unusable:

The idea is that if you ran the script 100s, or 1000s of times, over the course of several months, on all of your data, it would likely make it more difficult for Facebook’s algorithms to pull useful data it uses to build a profile of you, including your political leanings and sexual orientation.

“Every little bit of information contributes to that invisible profile that they’re building of everyone,” Matthew said. “If we can obfuscate it even a little bit, that at least puts the power back into your hands as an end user.”

Again, this is a do-at-your-own-risk solution but it may be a way to combat the Facebook machine before you peace out.