DALLAS (WBAP/KLIF News) – In the wake of a scandal over a Facebook breach that exposed people’s personal information and was allegedly used by a political consulting group, experts say Internet users need to pay attention to user agreements.
“Sometimes we intentionally choose to be ignorant if we like something and I think we’re seeing a lot of that right now,” said Shawn Tuma, a data protection attorney in Dallas.
He said a lot of people are dialed into social media throughout the day but may not think about the fact that the more active a user is the more information can be obtained.
“Don’t take all these little tests. The tests are designed to gather information about you,” said Tuma.
Tuma said at the end of the day, Facebook was designed to make money.
“They created it for a purpose. It’s not altruistic for the good of humanity. It’s a business,” he said.
Tuma said to be safe the rules are simple. “If you don’t like the site’s privacy agreement, don’t use it,” he said.
Facebook’s stock plummeted by more than 6.7 percent last week as news broke that the company allegedly allowed political analytics firm Cambridge Analytica to harvest information from more than 50 million Facebook users without their consent.
The firm was hired as a consultant for then candidate Donald Trump’s campaign and used the information to create politically-charged advertisements.
Cambridge Analytica has denied the allegations and said it got the information from a third-party app and got rid of it once they learned the data did not meet United States privacy protection laws.
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