The other morning I was sitting at my favorite coffee shop, having a discussion with one of my morning friends, on the kind of data your phone collects on you. As we talked thru my traditional soapbox of why I choose iOS over Android, they mentioned the experience of having an ad pop up in their Facebook feed from a local yoga instructor that they talked with just a few days earlier. They had not “friended” or “Linked” or “Followed” that person, but had just had a simple impromptu conversation with them one morning over coffee. I suggested that perhaps they were in the perfect target market for an ad to this Yoga studio. And that given the amount of data that facebook can track from being on your phone, it could have done a simple Venn diagram of the fact that both of them had been in close proximity recently, and met certain demographic characteristics.
Many of the tech pundits that I listen to are starting to remove Apps from their mobile phones, as these apps have much more access to data from your phone than most people realize. I had wanted to find out how powerful some of this ancillary data can be, and so, I recently updated an app that I am working on to add Facebook integration. That integration now allows me to get non-personally identifiable data about how my app is used: where on the global, what time of the day, for how long, and by many different demographic slices. Still pretty innocuous data, but realize that is my view of the data, not Facebook’s view of the data. Also, realize that my app does not require you to log into facebook to get this data. If you did log in, you are now personally identifiable. Again, imagine this for every app that you use that has facebook integration. And extended that data to all the people who use Facebook. The view of the world and the power of social networks note becomes exponentially more evident.
The bigger issue to privacy is that most people will log in to Facebook, and not think twice about allowing it access to their contacts – to find more friends. That data is now in the network, even if you try to never use, visit, or interact with facebook, you will have a profile being built, based on your “friends”.
A few years ago, Apple integrated Twitter and Facebook as system level APIs to enable better social sharing of information. This has been removed in iOS 11. I believe that this is directly related to Apple’s privacy policy. At the system level, these services would have had much more access to information about the user, that they may not have now. This continues to be in contrast to Android, which the phone manufacturer automatically grants Google access to your data as part of their licensing agreement (I hope this changes and if it has – would someone help me find that proof). I continue to refuse to use Android for that reason, and yes, it has an adverse impact on the ability for Siri and other personalization services on iOS to be as affective as Android.
Do you think the trade off is worth it?