Yesterday was January 12, 2020, the day my Facebook account became unrecoverable after a thirty-day purgatory, beginning with my deletion request on December 13, 2019. So I did it! Thanks to readers who have followed along with me through this process and thanks especially to Wade Roush who set an example to follow, and who gave me the chance to participate in an episode of his Soonish podcast on leaving Facebook.
So what am I going to spend my time trying to extricate myself from now that I don’t have Facebook to struggle with? Well there’s no shortage of things, but my eyes are on my cell phone. Wouldn’t it be nice if data brokers hadn’t captured my location history over the past decade, didn’t know every place I’ve been and how long I’ve spent there, weren’t profiting from this extreme privacy invasion, weren’t applying the stolen data to opaque purposes, and weren’t still collecting it with impunity? How do I know my location information has been compromised? Well, I don’t really, because there’s no way to find out who might have it, so there’s no way to see what they have, and there’s no way to ask for it back. But my freaking out is not unprompted. I was persuaded to freak out by the One Nation Tracked series in the New York Times where they show how data brokers have amassed enough location pings from “leaky” mobile apps that it’s possible to track the minute-by-minute whereabouts of secret service agents and senior pentagon officials and celebrities, not just folks like me. They talk about how this data, bought and sold by political campaigns, governments, and malicious actors could be used for blackmail, election influence, and other stuff that compromises democratic life. So you might want to read the article. I’ve been keeping my phone in airplane mode more often, and otherwise trying to keep location services off, with no illusions that this will make a dent in the problem – but it makes me feel good! ■