Rafael Núñez Aponte, MásQueSeguridad’s CEO, encouraged Venezuelans to optimize the security settings of their social networks to keep their personal information from being used by large data mining companies.

In an interview with Cyberespacio, Núñez, also known as Rafa White Hacker Núñez, said:

“I urge you to go to your Facebook settings, then to your ‘privacy’ tag and limit the amount of people who gets access to your information, preferably by setting it to ‘friends’ only, since most people have their profiles be open to ‘everyone’,” while he also encouraged users to unlink all third-party apps from their Facebook accounts.

He went on to explain that the recent incident surrounding the leaking of information from Facebook had to do with a data mining company that, through a third party, gained access to all the information this social network had on about 300,000 people, all of which they subsequently sent to Donald Trump’s campaign team. Núñez claims that “this has been going on for years, and it’s nothing but a flexibility issue going on between Facebook and third-party apps.”

“People don’t read, they don’t edit their sharing settings […] When you check the box saying ‘I agree to the Privacy Policy’, there are clauses that no one bothers to read, because they are about 40 pages long, where it says that they can change the policies whenever they want, and Facebook is indeed transparent about this,” he explained, as he also broke down the details of the debate going on in the United States on how this is legal and it’s nothing but poor policy agreements between Facebook and these third-party applications.

The app involved in this is called ‘This Is Your Digital Life’, and they claimed to be able to predict certain personality traits from users, based on the model by Cambridge’s psychology professor, Alexander Kogan.

“That’s what they want: to gather so much information from the user that they can put it into a predictive algorithm and know what that person will be doing in the future. This is also applied in Business Intelligence and War Economies to predict consumption patterns,” said Rafa Núñez.

 General recommendations

 Rafael Núñez Aponte presents a series of basic recommendations to keep information from our social networks from being used against us.

The first thing, according to him, is to make sure your email is protected, he says that he recomments “activating the double authentication factor, also called ‘two-step verification’, which is a system that generates a second password to verify it’s you accessing your email and that makes it much safer.”

He also urges us not to set up passwords that are in any way related to your personal information.

He emphasizes on the importance of removing personal information from the site and limiting your advertising preferences; “on Facebook, there is something called ‘Privacy Check Up’, it’s an option that allow you to check your privacy settings in different stages. Take 5 minutes out of your day to check on this.”

“Given the high levels of insecurity in our country, I advise not to upload any pictures of your homes, your family, or the trips you go on,” he insisted.

Another suggestion is not to allow your social networks to access your geolocator and see your location, since this makes it possible for data mining companies to see the places you frequently visit, things such as your favorite restaurants and more.

“Be watchful of the information you share online, because you’re basically handing it out to these companies, and there’s no way of knowing what they plan to do with that information later on,” said Rafa White Hacker.