BYNDUMBE BELL GASTON IN DOUALA
Shocking evidences have been revealed through recent sources of information that Facebook and perhaps other giant advertisers and oligopolies, have for decades, been collecting daily individual data from their subscribers without due authorization, therefore infringing on their privacy rights.
Subscriber details such as your phone numbers, the number of calls you make a month, to whom, where you were and sometimes, what is discussed, is carefully collected and kept as data without the knowledge of the subscribers.
Facebook has a daily global subscription rating of roughly 1.3 billion inhabitants and it has recently lost tens of millions of subscribers and some investors because of the undemocratic means that the rights have been abused and their unclear intentions on how these data can be manipulated to satisfy their hidden agenda.
The recent alleged abusive discovery made on 50 million users during the American presidential election by one British firm called Cambridge Analytical is just a case in point.
Such Facebook data may be procured or utilized in ways that the subscriber does not like,says and expert, so there are questions of how this can be changed while other experts think that the issue of enacting effective regulations will not be easy. Across the board, users all over the world think that they cannot do without Facebook, Google, apple and other transnational platforms. These constitute part of their daily lives.
An expert of the European Union says there is a new EU regulations in the making to starting in May 2018 and it is reported that all these oligopolies are taking steps to comply. They have the responsibility to disclose the type of data, how they are using it, and make sure that they must be very clear in the way they communicate, as part of efforts to bring change. The problems of Facebook have brought awareness to others that they are being watched even without the regulations put in place yet.