User data collection on Facebook much more extensive than just by Cambridge Analytica

The travails related to the revelation of massive Facebook data collection are not subsiding – and as the lyric goes “all the news is bad” – including growing discussion about “data lust,” covert operations abroad, and undermining democracy with data driven political marketing, Tim Berners-Lee opining about damage done and future paths, and the Irreversible Damage of Mark Zuckerberg’s Silence as just a few examples of the completely understandable pile-on about Facebook’s nebulous admission concerning the “non-data breach” whose fate was supposedly diminished in impact by a legal agreement (no less).

So, in following, have you ever clicked on one of the seemingly endless parade of apps urging you to waste time by identifying strange answers to a very long series of questions about absurd subject matter – such as – the cow game? Via the Atlantic – another reason to feel dyspepsic about your FB usage – My Cow Game Extracted Your Facebook Data – The Cambridge Analytica scandal is drawing attention to malicious data thieves and brokers. But every Facebook app—even the dumb, innocent ones—collected users’ personal data without even trying. “…Cow Clicker is not an impressive work of software. After all, it was a game whose sole activity was clicking on cows. I wrote the principal code in three days, much of it hunched on a friend’s couch in Greenpoint, Brooklyn. I had no idea anyone would play it, although over 180,000 people did, eventually. I made a little money from the whole affair, but I never optimized it for revenue generation. I certainly never pondered using the app as a lure for a data-extraction con. I was just a strange man making a strange game on a lark….And yet, if you played Cow Clicker, even just once, I got enough of your personal data that, for years, I could have assembled a reasonably sophisticated profile of your interests and behavior. I might still be able to; all the data is still there, stored on my private server, where Cow Clicker is still running, allowing players to keep clicking where a cow once stood, before my caprice raptured them into the digital void…”