Facebook wants to know less about you, and that's great
It will soon be 19 years since the launch of Facebook. Almost two decades in which social networks have gone from being something minority and still incipient, to becoming one of the main means of communication and information for millions and millions of people throughout the world. Some years in which we have seen how the perception of them changed, the success of many, the collapse of even more and the erratic present of those that, at the time, seemed to be the most important in the world.
I'm mainly talking, of course, about Facebook and Twitter. Regarding the second, in recent weeks we are witnessing a truly bizarre and grotesque process, worthy of the best of the fascinating inventiveness of Don Ramón María del Valle-Inclán. Now, that since the arrival of Elon Musk that network has become a permanent fire, it does not mean that before that it was a happy arcadia. Quite the contrary, the service already suffered from not a few problems such as hate and misleading information that, yes, at least those responsible were trying to solve it.
Facebook, for its part, lived through a golden age, a time when its numbers didn't grow, it's that they looked like a spaceship taking flight. They were naive times, in which many of the users of the social network did not hesitate to publish some quite private aspects on it. Sexuality, political ideology, religious beliefs... information, all of them, that today enjoy an enormous level of protection by regulations such as the GDPR but that, in those days, were publicly revealed in user profiles or, at least , were uploaded to the platform.
The Facebook reputation crisis sparked by the Cambridge Analytica scandal changed everything. Suddenly many people began to wonder if it made sense to have uploaded such information to Facebook, either to make it public or to keep it private. Suddenly, as if impelled by the coup, millions of users began to delete said information from their profiles and, at the same time, the use of the social network's services decreased little by little, but steadily.
