Disabling the Facebook Platform

For some of us, it’s not a surprise that those cute Facebook quizzes that tell you which Hogwarts house your spirit animal belongs to are actually a data mining tool. But I guess most people didn’t really realize how much they were giving away.

But now this article is out... Revealed: 50 million Facebook profiles harvested for Cambridge Analytica in major data breach and now people are paying a little more attention.

Some memes have gone around about disabling the Facebook Platform option, which cuts you off from all of these access points in one fell swoop. But I do tech support sometimes. I know this stuff is hard for a lot of people. So I made an illustrated primer. Note: you can click on the pictures to see them bigger.

Step 1: Go into Settings.

First, click on the little triangle in the upper right, next to where your Notifications show up (circled in red with a number 1 next to it). Then in the menu that shows up, click on Settings (circled in red with a number 2 next to it).

Step 2: Select Apps.

Again, the red circle, this time at the lower left, is your target. Note that I obliterated my name and other select information from this screenshot. This is an example of being necessarily cagey with our private information.

Step 3: Edit your Apps, Websites, and Plugins Setting. 

This one’s easy... just click the red-circled Edit button. The blue circle indicates an area that may have MANY MANY things in it-- these are all the apps that are currently connected to your Facebook account and have access to your data. When we know better, we do better. There were a few in this section when I did this the first time, too.

Step 4: DISABLE PLATFORM.

There’s a huge explanation of all the wonderful stuff you will miss out on if you do this. It’s okay. You can create your own relationship with these websites. I got a lovely email from Kickstarter letting me know that I could visit their site to add a password and create an independent account. (It totally looked like a scam email.)

But I do appreciate how "Disable Platform" sounds like something Captain Jean-Luc Picard tells Worf to do during a hostile engagement.

You’re all done! Now you will get an error message telling you to enable Platform if you want to take the latest quiz to find out which Walking Dead character your breakfast is. But that's okay. We all know it’s Shane anyway. (Maybe. I don't watch The Walking Dead. I picked him out from the Wiki.)

The Social Security Heist: It's Worse Than You Thought

Had an epiphany today in a discussion about Social Security.

We are all familiar with this graph, right?

So somewhere around 1973 (probably caused by my birth), wages stagnated as productivity continued to climb. We all know where that money went: into the pockets of the folks at the top.

In 1973, the minimum wage was $1.60 per hour and the Social Security Maximum Taxable Earnings was $10,800 per year, or about $5.19 in hourly full-time equivalents-- exceeding the minimum wage by a factor of 3.2. Interestingly, the median individual income in 1974 (not sure why the Census table stops there) was $5,335, so the cap was at approximately twice the median. (The cap applies to individual income, not to household income.)

As income accrued to the higher end of the bracket, often not even as wages, but as capital gains, it was not taxed for Social Security. This has been going on for more than FORTY YEARS.

Consider, for a moment, that if over the last ~44 years, this money had been going into our pockets and taxed for Social Security at a rate ranging from 5.85% (in 1973) to 6.2% (now), how much more money would currently be in the trust fund.

This is money they stole from ALL OF US. Not just in our wages, but in our long-term security.

I thought I was already angry....