Data farming: The Dark Underbelly Of Facebook Competitions

Winzum was created with the intention of providing honest, creative, and fun online competitions for a wide demographic of lovely people with absolutely no funny business, but unfortunately that isn’t the case for all online competitions.

This is especially true in regard to Facebook competitions, which are commonly used as huge personal data farms. Personal data protection is incredibly important in the 21st century you know, mainly because sensible personal data has never been so valuable.

Nowadays there are lots of nasty businesses operating behind a friendly Facebook competition façade, who are actually just out to get as much personal data as possible to then sell to advertisers. There is a dark underbelly to many Facebook competitions you will encounter these days; over at Winzum you can trust us to give you a lowdown.

What is data farming?

We hear you: data isn’t something that grows in the ground, so how on Earth do you farm it? As Wikipedia put it, “data farming is the process of using designed computational experiments to “grow” data, which can then be analysed using statistical and visualization techniques to obtain insight into complex systems”.

Now, this doesn’t sound particularly bad on the face of it, and in reality data farming can be used for all kinds of exciting things. However, when we talk about it in relation to Facebook competitions things take a much more sinister turn. This is because with Facebook competition data farming it is your own sensitive personal data that is being farmed and commodified – do you really want that?

What is the point of data farming?

At first it can be difficult to see why nasty companies are out to farm your sensitive personal data through Facebook competitions without you knowing, however when you consider the extent of modern advertising things become a lot clearer.

The point to online sensitive personal data farming is almost always to do with advertising, as the more a company knows about you, the easier it will be for them to sell you something. See our The Scary World of 21st Century Data Farming article here for more. [scary world of 21st century data farming]

Again, this doesn’t always have to be a bad thing, however as recent GDPR personal data laws have shown, it is in everyone’s best interests to keep our sensitive personal data secure. One clear example of how data farming can really mould society is in the case of Cambridge Analytica, and how they targeted voters on the fence about Brexit.

How to spot a data farming Facebook competition or event At Winzum we love to run Facebook competitions too, which is proof that not all Facebook competitions are evil data farms. There are a variety of different things that you can look out for in order to spot an obvious data farming Facebook competition.

The main one is simply to do a quick bit of background research on the particular Facebook page running the Facebook competition. Was it only set up very recently? Does it have many “likes” or user reviews? Lots of data farming Facebook competitions are set up by a Facebook page claiming to be an official wing of something like British Airways or TUI too, so look out for this.