apps typically have their own storage
they're using facebook's api to ask for
your data and then they take it and
process it and store it and
they probably conform to their country's
data storage laws but um
facebook's not
keeping that information you've given it
to a company for them to take away yeah
and that's why you have to contact those
companies and say please delete my data
we actually give away a lot of data
without really thinking about it and
this has come up in the news recently
because there's a company cambridge
analytica who've used some data from an
app that was built by a professor at a
university
for a research reason and then the data
has been passed on and on and on it's
interesting to talk about how apps
offer your data around or when the when
people build an app what they want from
you
uh and why did they build it was the
biggest question because there's
normally a reason they built these apps
how easy is it to make all these apps is
it a complicated process it's it's
pretty super easy and they've got
example code snippets on facebook's
developer site you pretty much copy and
paste those lines of code in and then
change what you do after you get the
permission they've basically got a
framework that makes it easy for you to
ask for types of data
and then uh to get permissions from user
for that type of data without having to
do much coding so first of all i say
there's two major types of situation
that we tend to get into one is where
you've used facebook to log into another
website and actually yeah we should
acknowledge we're not just talking about
facebook here the most social media
platforms have one of these apis to log
in with twitter log in with google and
and that's a common thing that a lot of
us do because it makes everything super
convenient the other type of way we do
this is that we install these kind of
fun little apps like a little quiz to
know how much we know about kittens or a
little app which gives you a tag cloud
of the most commonly used words you use
in all of your posts or which celebrity
do you look most like and then it takes
your facebook picture and then merges it
with a celebrity and says you look a
little bit like some celebrity that you
want to look like but in order to do
those things like generate a word cloud
of your posts or to take your facebook
image and merge it with a celebrity they
have to ask for information about you or
get access to your data
and we should think a little bit about
why they did that and that's probably
the question we should ask ourselves
more and haven't done a lot of the time
why would someone want to build an app
which creates a tag cloud of all of your
posts um they might be interested in
analyzing lots of posts to know what
sort of things people talk about
and so they
they then want a reason
[Music]
for you to give them the posts like you
wouldn't say yeah sure i'll give my data
to that company they said that company
they go why would someone want to give
us all of the posts we could generate a
word cloud for them that would be a nice
thing that they would get benefit from
and we would get benefit from are they
upfront about what they do with your
data they should be
and they have to be more upfront about
it now uh in 2014 facebook added a kind
of
permissions request uh
process for review
so now when you write an app and submit
it they then look at why did you ask for
the data what do you intend to use it
for
but then after you've said yes
it then goes on to how trustworthy they
are as a company so they they might have
very well said why they wanted to access
it and it might be that when it pops up
and asks for permission it says we want
to use this data
here's a link to why
but most people like all terms and
conditions just sort of say yeah yeah
sure so go ahead and actually it's very
scary to see what facebook thinks you
like
i had a quick look on the things it
gives me adverts for and it was alcohol
parenting and animals so in that order
as well so i'm obviously tweeting too
much about uh the wine bar that we like
once you've given that permission is
that in perpetuity then is that forever
or is that just up to now that's uh so
it varies a little bit about what you
give it permission for and whether you
give it historical information about all
of your posts or just the things you
currently like um
but then once they've got that they're
then bound by data laws which we're not
going to go too far into in this um
but they should if you ask them to
delete your data which is partly where
this question came from in the current
news topic
but really once you've given it to them
you have to proactively ask them to
delete it so when they write an app like
that
they have to request using the sample
lines of code
to access certain types of data and one
thing that's a little bit scary is that
anything that's public about
you
they don't need reviewed by facebook
so
your public profile
they can anybody can create an app which
will access your public profile and you
can say yes and install it too and
facebook doesn't check it because it's
just accessing the public information
that
you have public on facebook there's a
few things i've learned i've learned
that there's a whole lot of apps i did
not know i gave my data to so i've at
some point just stepped over this in
order to do it there's there's random
ones like piggy shared i don't really
know what piggy share does but for some
reason it knows all of my friends in
those all of my posts and it's looked at
them some of them i definitely use for a
good reason like spotify i have in there
and i want it to be there because
it somehow interacts with my social
interest in music and actually what you
can do is if you go to settings and then
in the settings section go to apps you
can see every single app that you've
given permission to what information
you've given it and whether or not
you're allowing it to post and if it is
posting who can see those posts whether
it's your friends everybody or just you
and you can edit all of those things so
you can now go back and say actually i
don't want you to see this information
so if that's information that's not yet
happened like the things you will like
over the next few weeks you can from
this point stop those apps seeing that
information in the future
however if you delete an app or take
away permissions
facebook then clearly says to you we've
taken away permission from this app to
use that data or see that data but it's
up to you to ask that company to delete
your information facebook has no control
to make that company necessarily delete
it it says you have to do it so you have
to
find the people who created the app
contact them and say
please delete what you have about me
which is a
a scary situation you find yourself in
where you realize
you have to
manually contact 30 companies to say
you've got information about me which
i don't really want you to have anymore
please delete it and then you just have
to hope those companies conform to
data protection laws and then we'll
delete it is that country reliant though
i mean might they freely ignore you
because they're based somewhere else
probably yeah i should that's that's
another computer file video on privacy
law i think the scariest thing is
probably that when
an app asks for your information
facebook allows
you to give away what you know about
other people to the app to improve your
experience to the app so it might say we
want information about all of your
friends and so there's a section on
there which is the scariest thing i
found um for me and i guess i kind of
knew this but it's interesting to see it
now it's a setting that you can control
if it's not too late
it's too late for all the things that
people that your friends have given away
about you so far but you can say
i will let my friends
give information about me to other apps
for this type of information your
religious views your birthdays your
family and relationships what things you
like that type of information which you
allow all of your friends to see
and therefore you allow your friends to
give that information to
other apps
and so while you log into facebook you
can see a list of all of the apps you've
installed and what data you've given
them
you can't see a list of all of the apps
that your friends
have given your data to and
you don't know what data that
necessarily is or what they've asked for
but yes maybe someone that you're
closely friends with
who's got access to pretty much an
unvetted version of your facebook
has maybe given away lots of aspects of
your data to other companies so one
thing you can do right now if you want
to stop this happening more is you can
go into settings and then the apps bit
of the settings and apps others use is
what it's called there's a checkbox list
of all the things that you allow
apps that other people use to see about
you
and you can go straight away and untick
all of those it might be that you become
not included in their who your 10
closest friends
type apps but
maybe you feel better about having
protected your data it's kind of thing
you should do every few months is review
what you've purposefully accidentally
given information to and whether you
want to re-restrict that and hopefully
those companies then abide by
removal laws effectively
but we need a whole other competitive
video on privacy laws properly
first out or fifo is something that
programmers and communications engineers
understand very very well so we went and
wrote some software which does a 5 foot
tent of the blockchain
and so whenever coins are stolen and put
in a transaction