[Image: Tweet by Emily Mullin (@EmilyLMullin) and tweet by Isobelle Winter (@IsobelleWinter), both about the dangers of Facebook’s new preventative health screening tool. Images have been modified for visual ease but information has not been changed.]
Something to know about Facebook’s new “screening tool,” and advice/info that can most certainly be used outside of this specific situation.
For spoonies, the biggest deal is how this data, if leaked, could affect you in professional and insurance spheres.
Here’s Emily’s full thread, which discusses the details of the tool, and here’s Isobelle’s full thread, which extrapolates on specific dangers.
In the end? It’s another data grab. Data is worth money; don’t give yours away, especially not to Facebook.
Yeah, please don’t use this thing. When you let companies have your personal information, they will use it against you. You might not realize it until years later, when you get a big medical bill and insurance refuses to cover it because you once told Facebook you might have ADHD (or something) and that counts as a pre-existing condition.
Yeah DONT DO THIS.
Spread the word
For the love of God and green apples, do not share your medical information with fucking Facebook.
Look, I do not pretend to understand why people still use Facebook; I only go in a couple of times a year to make sure they haven’t fucked up my privacy settings again and I do it in an incognito tab because anything Facebook is blocked in all my browsers. The only reason I still have it–and LinkedIn and several other accounts–is to make sure I have an internet footprint under my wallet name in places that people expect you to have a footprint. Even with strict privacy settings, I don’t put anything in any profile that I wouldn’t tell a stranger if they asked me IRL. Ideally, I look boring and like I don’t know what the internet is.
Let’s pretend, for the sake of argument, that Facebook won’t use it against you–I mean, it’s not like they ever ran secret psychology experiments or anything, what on earth could they possibly do with more specific information on your physical and mental health is truly a mystery–and won’t sell this data (pretending!): they’re going to be hacked.
Not ‘maybe’: they will be hacked. They might even tell users about it if a court order is involved. Who are you okay with knowing your intimate medical data? If it’s not ‘everyone present and future for this will live forever on the internet’ maybe rethink that.
Now, let’s talk about simple economic reality and stop pretending; I think my suspension of disbelief needs bed rest after that.
Facebook isn’t your friend; it may contain friends, but it is not a friend, an actual person, or even a private company; it’s a corporate entity listed on NASDAQ currently selling at $190 and change a share and worth roughly five hundred and forty-one billion dollars ($541,000,000,000), which is almost four times more than Netflix or Disney and three hundred billion less than Google. They’re worth more than fucking Wal-Mart. Facebook, Inc’s entire reason for existing is to make money for stockholders, as much money as possible, and to constantly look for more ways to make more money because that’s what you do in capitalism. Everything they do is because they think it will make more money; if it won’t make them more money, they’re not going to do it.
They want to make more money, they want to be Amazon and Apple, valued at 1.2 trillion each ($1,200,000,000,000) as soon as economically possible. They will not only use your data themselves, they’ll sell it to the highest bidder. There is literally no fucking way they won’t. They’re a corporate entity trading at $190 a share with a market cap of roughly five hundred and forty-one billion and everything they do is to increase company value and raise the price of their stock so they make more money for shareholders. They have no other reason to exist.
