Beware Facebook users – your data is not safe

Although Facebook has been one of the most popular social media sites for many years, a snowballing scandal is suddenly causing its rapid decline.

The information has been coming out about Facebook providing a Cambridge psychologist with information of 50 million users without their consent.

Later, this information came into the hands of Cambridge Analytica, an election consultancy.

This information was eventually used to build voter profiles that helped Donald Trump win the American presidential election of 2016, and the scandal has even been linked to the victory of the BJP (Bharatiya Janata Party) in the 2014 elections in India.

Both the BJP and Congress have denied any links to Cambridge Analytica, but records have revealed otherwise.

Alarmed by this misuse of their information, thousands of Facebook users have logged onto the site to delete their accounts.

In doing so, they found that Facebook stores data and complete logs of all incoming and outgoing calls from users’ phones, as well as data of all SMS (Short Message Service) messages.

Additionally, users have found it difficult to actually delete their accounts, and the site pushes them to “deactivate” their account instead of deleting it.

However, only deactivating an account allows all personal data and information to stay on Facebook’s servers forever.

#DeleteFacebook is a movement that is sweeping social media platforms, urging Facebook users to delete their accounts due to the site’s privacy breaching.

Tens of thousands of users have been deleting their accounts, and the movement is still popularly trending on social media.

A Facebook spokesperson defended the uploading of phone data, saying how to contact uploading is optional, and that people are asked to give their permission if they want their contacts uploaded or not.

However, permanently deleting a Facebook account does not ensure that the contacts are removed from Facebook servers.

#DeleteFacebook is still a growing movement, and it may be a necessary action to take if the privacy of this information is not being protected.

Image by Hermann Traub from Pixabay (Free for commercial use)

Image Reference: https://pixabay.com/illustrations/facebook-logo-social-network-770688/