Week in Review: December 6, 2016

Delete Yourself from the Internet Swedish developers Wille Dahlbo and Linus Unnebäck have launched Deseat.me, a website that will allow users to “clean up your Internet presence”. By granting the website access to your Google account, the application can scan all your emails through Google’s OAuth protocol and will generate a list of apps, websites, and other accounts that are connected to your email address. The website has successfully worked in removing accounts on Facebook, Evernote, Dribble, YouTube, LinkedIn, and many more. Then, you are given an option of “Add to Delete Queue” or “Keep” for each account. If you regret deleting an account, the website offers a grace period, during which users can reactivate accounts that they’ve deleted. What exactly does it means to delete yourself on the Internet? The website promises to expunge the accounts that you’ve developed with your email address, but references and engagement with other people’s accounts still remain. For instance, on Facebook, your shares and likes will still appear on other’s profiles. At the moment, Deseat.me only works with Google accounts. Another limitation is that the website hasn’t completely figured out how to unsubscribe from newsletters that do not have direct unsubscribe links. To address privacy concerns with email scanning, the website’s developers assure users that the program runs only on one’s computer, not on a server. Although it doesn’t have access to login info for the websites associated with your Google account, the Daily Dot recommends removing Deseat.me’s access once you are finished using the service as an extra safety precaution.

The Fake News Problem and Facebook’s Proposed Solution Fake news was a problem this election cycle in the United States. From “Pope Francis Shocks the World, Endorses Donald Trump for President” to “Barack Obama Admits He Was Born in Kenya”, false news stories spread like wildfire throughout the social media website Facebook and may have played a role in swinging the election towards one candidate’s favor. Where is the fake news coming from? Entrepreneurial teens in Macedonia are circulating sensationalist stories on the platform in order to make monetary gains from the advertisements. Fake news has been described as a digital gold rush in the Eastern European countries. Hostile foreign intelligence agencies alike are feeding fake information into the platform in order to undermine governments abroad. According to the Pew Research Center, 44% of American adults got at least some of their news through Facebook. Earlier this year, Facebook had received heavy criticism for supposedly suppressing conservative news stories and replacing human curators with software. Unfortunately, the algorithms are less perceptive at detecting fake news stories. On November 12, Facebook denied that the hoaxes shared on the website had any influence on the outcome. However, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg recently detailed his plans to identify fake news stories and “disrupt economies of fake news”. They are hoping to