They
killed Margaret Clitherow on the 25th of March, 1586. They did it very slowly,
by laying her own front door on top of her and then piling rocks on top of it until
she was crushed to death, a process called "pressing." It took about 15 painful minutes for her to die. (Which
is nothing compared to the ordeal of 81-year-old Giles Corey of Salem,
Massachusetts. Corey was pressed to death for refusing to plead after having
been accused of witchcraft. He was a stubborn old man. It took him 3 days to
die, and each time his torturers asked him if he was ready to plead, he is said
to have responded by crying, "More weight!") Margaret's crime was not
witchery, it was that she belonged to the wrong religion at the wrong time. She
was a Catholic (and was later sainted), which was not exactly a crime at the
time, though it was mightily frowned upon. What was a crime was
harboring Catholic priests and failing to attend the prescribed and approved
church. (Keep this in mind when you hear someone argue for the compulsory presence of
religion in schools, in politics, and in society in general. Be sure to ask
them which religion they're talking about. After all, you wouldn't want
to select the wrong one.) Margaret failed to attend church and
she harbored priests, and then—like Corey—refused to plead. (They refused to
plead because that way their families, including children, could not be called
to trial and tortured until they gave "evidence," which would then
give the authorities the right to repossess any land or other property
belonging to the family.) Corey and Clitherow suffered excruciating deaths largely
to spare their families; they were tougher than you and me.
Naturally,
thinking of huge, heartless entities crushing innocents to death made me think
of Facebook.
Facebook
collects information about us—about you and me. A lot of information.
Then they sell that information (supposedly anonymized and aggregated) to their
"partners," companies that wish to sell us goods.
How
much data, you ask? Well, you can find out for yourself fairly easily. Just go
to your Facebook settings; then select Settings and then click “Download a copy
of your Facebook data.” The company will send you a ZIP file containing about
25 folders, each of which contains several HTML documents full of data the
company has collected about you. (The complete process is nicely explained
here: https://tinyurl.com/ybpp7drb.)
I did that, and it was an enlightening process.
Here's just some of what
Facebook sent me:
A 'Stuff About Me' folder containing face
recognition data and address book info (friends, institutions, etc., going back
2 yrs)
An 'ADS' folder containing:
o Ad interests: 41
pgs of data, 1329 items, ranging from academy awards to action movies, from MacBooks
to Method acting, from Smartphones to Sonny Bono (?!), and from tattoos to time
travel.
o An ‘Advertisers Who
Uploaded a Contact List With Your Information’ document, whiuch was explained
thusly: "Advertisers who run ads using a contact list they uploaded that
includes contact info you shared with them or with one of their data
partners."
· This included a list of 211 advertisers, from
AARP to Zappos
o Advertisers I've interacted
with (which consisted of about 100 clicked ads)
An ‘Apps and Websites’ folder: Apps I've used
Facebook to log into (stretching back to 2013)
A document containing every FB post on which I've
commented—including the text of the comment—going back to 2013
o A list of every
person I'm following and every person who's following me, every page I've ever
Unfollowed, and every person I've "friended" and when (dating back to
2009)
A ‘Posts and Comments’ document that included every
"like" (or any other reaction) I've posted on a post or comment
A ‘Location History’ folder. Mine is empty, since
I've never "checked in" or otherwise informed FB of my location. (But
you may have.)
A list of every FB message I've sent or received
and from/to whom
A ‘Photos & Videos’ folder containing every…
Well, you get the idea.
o Security &
Log-In Info that included session cookies updated (148 MS Word pages, about
7,000 or so cookies), all devices authorized to log in (back to 2013) , and a list of where I've logged in from and when
A document listing my complete search history
And a handy Index.html doc that lets you get to
all of this stuff a lot more easily than poking around in every damned folder,
which is what I did. Unfortunately, I found this document last.
As
you can see, that's a lot of information about me—and honestly, I'm a pretty
boring person! Really. You can ask anyone.
![]() |
He doesn't look like an evil person, does he? At least, he didn't back in his Harvard days. Image licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 2.5 Generic license. |
I
don't like that.
Really,
most of these bits of data are relatively insignificant. If any one or two or
five of them got out in public or were sold to a marketer, it probably wouldn't
matter much. But, like the stones that killed Giles Corey and Margaret
Clitherow, eventually, the combined weight of the stones reaches a critical
mass and that one last stone finishes you off. Facebook has collected a LOT of
stones, enough to build a fairly accurate—and quite valuable—dossier on every
one of its over 2 billion customers. Eventually, we might end up being
crushed by those stones.
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