By Bryanna Bartlett
In-app advertisements seem to be convincing millions of social media users today that the company is listening in on
private conversations.
Even if the users cannot feel it, Instagram and Facebook are quite literally breathing down our necks. These companies hold a frightening power in our lives from the collection and sales of our social media platforms.
This phenomenon should leave the public fearful of an Orwellian “Big Brother” situation.
Social media users are reporting that the products they talk about aloud are showing up on their feed within days. The advertisements may seem too miraculous to be anything other than microphone-retrieved data. However, these accusations barely graze the surface of Instagram’s frighteningly pervasive data policy and the power of technology today.
The data collection includes: the people, pages, accounts, hashtags, or groups you are connected to, people you communicate with, ads you click, types of content you engage with, profiles you look at, all in-app actions, frequency and duration of your activities, camera usage, out-of-app cookies, battery status, location, face recognition, Bluetooth, amount of active apps, behaviors performed on the device, device IDs and even more.
According to Forbes, these social media companies use an artificial intelligence algorithm called “habit tracking” which produces big data points. Habit tracking, reading minds, meticulously guessing what we will like and want to see next: whatever you want to call it, it’s all the same.
This also is all part of the terms and conditions that users agree to when they sign up when registering for the apps. Whether users read the policies or not, they still agreed to it.
While we do live in a generation that is submerged in a reality molded by the internet, there must be a line that we draw as consumers.
There is no ethical reason as to why industrial giants should have this much insight into every action we take in digital life.
The power behind data tracking is uncanny and violating.
Instagram and Facebook are not secure vaults.
According to Instagram and Facebook’s data policy, the sites sell its users’ data to outside companies including advertisers, measurement partners, vendors, service providers, researchers, academics and law enforcement or legal requests.
As democratic users, we should have the right to deny these sales.
Over this past year, industrial companies Instagram and Facebook have been under close investigation by the U.S. government.
According to The New York Times, Facebook has been under deep scrutiny over their data policy by the Federal Trade Commission, the Securities and Exchange Commission, and the U.S. Justice Department’s securities fraud unit.
According to Forbes, Facebook paid $5 billion dollars in penalties for deceiving their users. The fine was merely a drop in the bucket compared to the amount of money Facebook makes in the sales of personal data every day.
One partner involved in the scandal was Cambridge Analytica.
According to The Guardian, the Cambridge Analytica data firm paid hundreds of thousands of Facebook users to take a personality test called “thisisyourdigitallife” in 2015.
All participants agreed to have their data collected for academic use, but that is not what happened.
As stated in The Guardian, Cambridge Analytica obtained data from more than 70.6 million users and did not go public with this sale until 2018.
Cambridge Analytica claimed to have constructed 5,000 data points for every American voter.
While the company was not allowed to sell to a third party, it did.
That third party was 2016 presidential candidate Donald Trump. According to The New York Times, Trump’s campaign led Project Alamo and tried to sweep the candidacy by psychologically categorizing American voters based on Facebook’s data.
It is one thing to have data stored about each individual using these social platforms, but it is beyond fearful to think that our personal data helped President Trump win the presidency.
With the 2020 election coming up, it feels scary to be ignorant in the transactions of our own personal data.
Users have always had the ability to access, rectify, port and erase their own data in the app settings. Instagram and Facebook’s data policy entails that once an account is deleted, all data and cookies in storage are deleted as well.
The influence behind these sites are playing a heavy hand on the future.
It is time to wake up and smell the severity.
There is great power in the technology that can envision big data and greater power in the companies that use it.
This power, however public, is dancing on the line of manipulation in millions of lives.
