PRINTF(PRIVACY == MYTH) IF(TRUE): HOW...?

The interesting story of Social Media!

The Island of Privacy!

Privacy is a myth!

Data is the new oil!

I am damn sure you have heard this before.

A beautiful interesting simile popular in the morning!

Consider the internet as the virtual world. Let social media be the continent. Unlike our world, this world consist of cities and Nations. Let's say each city is independent social media platform. The nation consists of different cities, this can be conveyed as the big Tech companies which on multiple social media platforms for example Facebook Inc. which owns Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp.
So in short,
World: internet, virtual world.
Continents: Social media, web, dark web, Deep web.
Nations: Big tech companies which own multiple social media platforms.
Islands: independent social media platforms.

The basic unit of this continent is a city/Island.
What does city look like?
It comprises of showrooms where everyone showcase themselves. (But this showroom do not sell anything!)
Then you might be thinking why to open a showroom if it doesn't sell anything?
Maybe only because everyone around you have one showroom there and you feel left out when your colleagues are busy in their virtual world. Individual cities alone can be considered as Island. There is one interesting phenomenon that applies to every City/ island, you can visit every other showroom and everyone is trying to make his showroom bigger one. This race of being the popular one, inspires us to put what we do, what we think, our photos, what we feel and everything else that we want to share with all!

Every City/Island has its own rules/ policies/ traditional paradigms of what user should do in that particular City/ island for eg. Instagram users are supposed to be photoholic, Twitter do not permit users to tweet above 140 characters, on LinkedIn you are supposed to be professional and on YouTube you need to accept the policies/rules strictly and behave as per them.

Now the question arises?

Who gains from all the cities (Social Media platforms)?

How does these Nations (Big Tech Giants) earn money?

To understand this, you can think about some things given below. As I mentioned earlier, users can roam around the city to see big showrooms.
The social media platform owners (City administrators) allow the brands in physical/ virtual world (across the globe) to intentionally put their showrooms on the routes of different users and charge the money for same. ( You frequently come across ads/ promoted content surfing virtually). These brands are endorsed and gain profit when the users visit them either on web or physically in stores to buy a new product/ subscription/ software.

To simplify this, let's consider A, B, C, D, E are users on Facebook. Brand x wants to promote his website/ Facebook page/ product on Facebook. He gives Facebook ₹120 (let's say) to reach 4000 users. Amongst them A, B, C, D see the promoted post on Facebook and A is convinced and started using brand X. Now, brand X is making profit for investment on Facebook.

There are billions of users on these platforms and through advertisements social media platform owners earn money! But that's not the only source of money at all.

Tech companies have information/ data/ detailed profile of all the users and this is an important source of money that we need to know about.
Somewhere on internet I have read, if you are not paying for service, you are the product."
How? Your personal data!

These social media platforms analyse your behaviour, clicks, likes, comments, posts, shares and create your detailed interest profile which includes your interests, what you like, which type of posts you interact more with and such information that you yourself and your family members didn't even know about!

To justify this,I like to give example of Cambridge analytica which had 5,000 data points on every American Voter in 2016. (Data Points <-> interest profile) (Source: The Great Hack, a Netflix Documentary)

Now,you come across ads that you are most likely to interact with and thus increasing the profits of the firms. In the case of Cambridge analytica it is alleged that Facebook kept its doors wide open for private firms to steal private data of users.
To simplify this, let's reconsider the previous example, A, B, C, D, E are users and brand X, Y, Z promote ads on Facebook. Now Facebook knows about interests of A, B, C, D, E. Facebook suggests (X-> A, B; Y-> C,D; Z-> E) That's individual targeting which increases user engagement and profits exponentially.

So why you should worry about all these things?

Another big concern,"individual manipulation". Since the company's know about your political interest as well, some firms that want to manipulate your political opinions, purchase this data and target individually. Individual impact might not be significant one but the big implications of this include us elections 2016 and Brexit referendum in England. The very idea of democracy is under threat in this digital age. Cyberspace is the new battlefield for many countries like Russia and Israel. Information warfare is the new tool of this modern war. Fake news, fake information, misinformation, disinformation are all aspects of this which we take for granted.

Now coming back to continent of social media and globe of internet, your data is your data and nobody should use it without your consent. In a technically advanced world, this seems probable impossible.

But here is my Idea, let's consider you open your showroom (account) on remote Island (sparsely used social media platform like Tumblr) and express your views freely.just put address of this showroom in the big city (Facebook) and when someone wants to know about you more, he can use that I address to find you!
For me it's www.sanket001.tumblr.com!🤗
This will help you to save your privacy. Well, some might say just stop using these social media platforms. Personally I feel, in this virtually socially connected world, the urge to share views is inscribed deeply or you can say it some sort of "Yugdharma" for you to tackle the fake information in this infodemic that might pop up when you surf the web.

We can say that this showroom on remote Island (micro-blog) can be considered if complex of privacy and expressing opinions is tackling your mind frequently. As per my experience till date, I have better learned to express my opinions without considering what others would think about it. This somehow allowed me to think about the big picture without considering traditional paradigms of social media expression without engaging in likes, views and shares.

I have simple question for you, Have you ever thought about this? You meet a person physically and do not exchange any contact details. Still you see particular profile on Facebook few days later in the suggested friends list. If yes then that's how our real lies and virtual lives have no difference in them and digital life is influencing physical lives and thoughts more than ever.

Privacy is a necessary thing for human growth and development.

Constantly surveilling your thoughts doesn't allow you to think about them and thus stopping you from enriching your ideologies. Continuously surfing the algorithmically suggested social media feed (knowingly/ unknowingly) polarises your views the way algorithm wants. There is one thing that you need to understand, the only matrix that matters for the social media companies is user engagement, the more you engage, the more time user is surfing the social feed, the more the profits!

So your ideologies, thoughts which seem to be in your control, are actually controlled by algorithms (obviously profit oriented one's) choking the growth of the curious mind and your growth, and shaping your worldview, the way intelligent profit oriented algorithm wants to to!

Is this the future that we seek?

 

Finally you might feel, you are getting knowledge about current events. But I just want you to ask one question, Is is really knowledge or just junk of randomised information and there is huge difference in information and knowledge.

So that's my concern and that's why I say privacy is important. We need to take these points into consideration or the reality might soon be like the movie "matrix" or you can say we are almost there!

Let's Fight fake news, misinformation and disinformation and be the information warriors in this new battlefield of cyberspace!

Due to privacy laws in last few years, now you can download your data for all the social media platforms. A simple google search is enough to know how to do it. First time, when I did that I was shocked. You can review security settings and disable ads personalisation which is enabled by default. For more information check security settings for facebooh, twitter, instagram, google and any other platform that you use!

I know this is a bit lengthy and a lot of stuff probably disarranged but that's how thoughts cycled in! Sorry for that. I will try to do better next time.

What do you think about this article?

Share your views in the comments below.
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If you are interested check out other blog posts on this blog.

You can connect with me on:
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/sankettambare01/
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/sanket_0_1/
Tumblr: https://sanket001.tumblr.com/

Thank you for reading this!
Keep reading!
Keep exploring!
Keep sharing!

Yours,
Sanket Tambare,
Email: sanket.tambare01@gmail.com