Delete Facebook account? First get your friends’ birthdays
A few weeks back there was the Cambridge Analytica Scandal at Facebook, where the consultancy company collected data of around 87 million Facebook accounts in order to trying to convince them to vote for Trump. According to The Washington Post Cambridge Analytica was able to access the data because 270k users downloaded an app and thereby gave access to their friends data, without their knowledge. Since of April, 9th you can check on Facebook whether your account has been accessed by Cambridge Analytica.
We discussed this scandal with a couple of friends and were talking about deleting our Facebook accounts. One of the arguments to not delete their account was that without FB, they wouldn’t know the birthdays of their friends. So I created a simple Python script that scrapes the birthdays of all your friends. Check it here.
Quite ironic though, scraping Facebook because you want to delete Facebook because someone else scraped Facebook.