First of all, this is not a tutorial on how to update your Facebook privacy settings or how to delete your Facebook account. There is already enough information available on that. Google it. Also, lets be clear that Facebook has your data. There is no doubt around that. Doesn’t matter if you have deleted your Facebook account or uninstalled the Facebook app, there are lots of other apps (WhatsApp, Instagram and a lot of third party apps) that you use on a daily basis which are regularly sending your data to Facebook. Often when concerns are raised around user data privacy with Facebook, people have one of the 2 reactions –

• Facebook is evil. Let’s delete Facebook and a bunch of deletefacebook hashtags start trending on social media for a few days. Then we forget all about it and Facebook gets back to collecting your data like nothing ever happened.
• People feel defenceless against such a big tech giant and they try to hide their helplessness by saying “I got nothing to hide”, “So what if Facebook has my data? I’ll get better ads. Nothing wrong with that”.

And this narrative is fine to a certain extent. I don’t really mind if my data is being used “only” for the purpose of personalizing ads for me. But the truth is, that nobody knows how and when your data can be misused and by whom. I mean who would have thought that taking a simple personality test would end up influencing your voting decision. Remember Cambridge Analytica?