The Dangers Lurking Behind Social Media
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| Image: Pixabay.com |
Smartphones have become an essential to our daily lives: photographs, text messages, contacts - our lives are now stored digitally. Social media has risen in popularity alongside the smartphone, providing more ways for us to keep in contact with friends and share what's going on in our lives. For some, this is the primary reason for owning a phone: what's the harm in sharing details of your life online? It's harmless, you'd think; who would care about what day you were born aside from the friends that want to wish you a happy birthday? Why does it matter?
Except it does. Data collection is rampant on social media, more now than ever. Facebook is the largest social media platform in the world and has had a long history of issues with user privacy, dating all the way back to 2006. In 2018, a massive breach occurred on the platform and Facebook finally promised to implement new "policy changes" twelve years after the initial privacy concern. Everything you see on Facebook is catered to what data they've collected about you: your likes, the advertisements you see -- it's part of the platform's algorithm, something meant to help improve user experience, but something that simultaneously invades user privacy from the moment they register.
Although data collection is entirely under the platform's control, users decide how much of their life they want to share on the platform -- and most tend to overshare. Online posts never go away, whether they go viral or only amass a single like. For instance, one woman in Paris requested all the personal data Tinder had collected, and she received over 800 pages back, all containing details about mundane things she'd liked on Facebook, where and when her conversations occurred, and even her posts on her Instagram account -- which she had deleted beforehand.
Artificial intelligence can collect tweets people make and determine their interests, and other intricate details about a person based on 8-9 related accounts. While the advancement of technology improves our quality of life, it's critically important to preserve your privacy - especially since it seems to be invaded more and more every year.
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