Facebook collects data about you— the websites you visit, searches, purchases, your cellphone’s details and location even if you are not a member and the app is not open. That’s one of the more outrageous findings from BBC research into the Terms and Conditions (T&Cs) for 15 of the top social sites and the way these allow people’s data to be used.
[Don’t Panic! but a quick check on my Android phone indicates it is not enough to uninstall the app, you also have to disable a companion “Facebook App Manager”.]
The sites [see tags] include Facebook, Youtube, Google, Twitter, Tinder, Netflix and the Guardian. BBC Research put the terms and conditions of each through a readability test. They found you need a university level education to properly understand them; it would take an average reader 9 hours, without breaks, to read them. All are more complex to read than Dickens’“A tale of two cities”. Despite this, many of these sites allow users as young as 13.
All this has a far more serious side, at least as far as the UK and EU are concerned. The privacy protecting “General Data Protection Regulation” (GDPR) is now in force. The law now requires web sites to get specific consent to the way the company uses their data if it is held in or collected from the EU. This has led to some US newspaper web sites “geoblocking” access from the EU. Others like Facebook, have different terms and conditions if you sign up from the EU.
Virtually everyone automatically clicks through the “Agree” button without fully reading and understanding these T&Cs. You (and I) will have agreed them when we first started our new cellphone. That includes allowing the background Facebook app to track you. Who the ***l has an hour or more to squint at a cellphone screen reading 10,000 words to see if it works?
That is in essence a challenge to all these companies that they may have to face quite quickly. The GDPR requires informed consent so it is argued that the data collection and use by these apps is now illegal. These companies will have to simplify their terms and conditions and then obtain detailed agreement to the use of data. Some could voluntarily suspend services in EU countries, like the newspapers, but the income loss would be too great. The only other alternative is to not collect the data from users in the EU but the loss would be even more — their programs become virtually worthless in terms of being able to package the data for sale and even operability. They could then abandon the “data for free use” model and make a monthly charge.
It’s some of the details of the data collected that is concerning in many ways, if not bordering on kinky. Tinder is a “dating app”.
Tinder says that the app collects data from your phone's accelerometers (for measuring movement), gyroscopes (which measure the angle you're holding your phone at), and compasses
[Lesson: turn your phone off while you are on a Tinder date and don’t keep it in your pocket!]
These terms and conditions also limit what you can do with the app or device. The BBC found that Apple say you cannot use your iPhone to make a nuke.
Apple has a line in its UK terms of use telling customers not to use their products "for any purposes prohibited by United States law".
According to their definition, that includes "without limitation, the development, design, manufacture or production of nuclear, missile or chemical or biological weapons"
I wonder if VP Trump (“Vladimir Putin’s”) will ask his Russian friend or “Little Rocket Man” if they use an iPhone. I suppose that will be enough to clear them of developing illegal WMD ( <cough> Novichok <chough>)