Liberate your smartphones

Cong Corrales .

“Paranoia is just reality on a finer scale.” -Strange Days (1995)

IT has been two full weeks since I unplugged my smartphone from the matrix of Mark Zuckerberg. I have deleted all Zuckerberg owned apps from my smartphone.

Now, I use my smartphone how it’s meant to be — for calls and SMS. Well, it would be hypocritical of me not to mention that I also use my smartphone as a calculator, for audio and video recording, and camera. However, I am now exclusively surfing the Internet, and accessing my social media accounts on my laptop.

It has been liberating.

The UK incorporated multinational auditing and consulting company, Deloitte Touche Tohmatsu Limited, monitor on mobile usage behavior revealed that at least 80 percent of Indonesians and Filipinos would have checked their phones within 15 minutes of waking up.

Having social media apps on your smartphone has altered the way we interact with our loved ones. I saw how intrusive it has been to our family time. I wanted to delete the apps even before the Facebook-Cambridge Analytica data breach scandal hogged the headlines.

But like most Filipinos, I was simply hooked on it.

A virtual friend — meaning, we haven’t met personally, only on Facebook — asked me last month what would it be like to disengage from social media platforms. I answered that it wouldn’t really change anything except that we’ll have to talk face to face next time without it.

However, the Facebook-Cambridge Analytica scandal was the last straw. When I discussed it with my real-time friends, most of them were not concerned at the slightest.

They said they were not concerned because they are careful with what they post. What they don’t get is that it is a continuing process. It doesn’t matter if you have been conscientious in what you do share on your Facebook wall. The app mines your account for data anyway. By the way, it also mines the data of all the friends on your account.

According to Avaaz, an Internet rights group, there have been 1,175,870 Filipinos whose data have been breached in the wake of the Facebook-Cambridge Analytica scandal. Facebook, itself, admitted that the Philippines had the second most number of accounts compromised in the data breach scandal.

Let’s go to the next best thing to texting. Since the Philippines has been the texting capital of the world, Facebook Messenger took the country by storm. You didn’t even need load because Zuckerberg has made a free data platform.

However, do you think your chats on Facebook Messenger are private? Last Thursday, Facebook confirmed that its staff uses automated tools to scan Messenger chats for malware links and child porn images. A Facebook moderator can review any messages that are flagged by users or the automated systems they have put in place.

Apparently, the reason why Zuckerberg can allow Facebook to be free is that its users are the product. The users’ data are the commodity. That may not sound much to you but in the hands of political manipulators and “thought leaders,” it is a gold mine.

You are responsible for what you post, that’s a given. However, if your user data are mined, these companies can have your virtual profile. They will know what usually do in a day, what brand of coffee you prefer, what bank you trust, and many other personal details of your life.

I am not quitting Facebook. I just took it off my smartphone so Zuckerberg couldn’t sell my and my friends’ user data to the highest bidder. But before I did that, I downloaded the data I’ve shared with Facebook since I joined it.

What I got was the history of everything I’ve done on Facebook, such as likes and comments on posts, use of apps and searches. The download also contained my profile, messages, list of friends, ads I’ve clicked on, and IP addresses I’ve used to connect to Facebook.

I must tell you, the download gave me a pretty good picture — a scary one at that— of what Facebook has on me.

I have since deleted all the contact details of my friends on my Facebook account. I can only hope my friends would do the same with my contact details on their Facebook accounts.

Now, because I have to reboot my laptop every time I access Facebook, my mornings are ultimately better. I pay more attention to real-time conversations. I don’t stumble or step into people’s toes in the street anymore.

Try it. It’s liberating.