Why Are You So Obsessed With My Data?
Photo by Collins Lesulie on Unsplash
During a 60 Minutes’ interview, former Facebook employee, Frances Haugen, revealed that she was the whistleblower who exposed to US federal law enforcement, in September, the details of how her former employer continues to prioritise profits over ethical practices (as cited in Pelley, 2021).
Evidence shows that the company is lying to the public about making significant progress against hate, violence and misinformation. One study from this year says, “we estimate that we may action as little as 3-5% of hate and about 6-tenths of 1% of V & I [violence and incitement] on Facebook despite being the best in the world at it.” (Pelley, 2021).
Hearing such claims rarely ever shock me nowadays given that a growing body of research proves that the main objective of media companies is to manipulate us into consuming massive amounts of content for their financial benefit. This is even the case for those of us who repeatedly claim, with great fanfare, that we can’t be manipulated because we are too smart, special, or whatever else we tell ourselves to not confront reality.
I can’t even tell you the number of times that I’ve closed my Instagram just to open it up again a few seconds later to scroll through mindlessly for hours with the complete understanding that the app was designed to keep me coming back for more. Proving that no one – not even those of us who have dedicated our lives to studying the harmful effects of mass media consumption – can outsmart the power of algorithms developed by human behaviour experts.
Therefore, it should come as no surprise that when the entire global community was unable to update their feeds last Monday, I, like millions of other addicts, flocked to Twitter – maybe for the fifth time this year – to figure out what the heck was preventing me from getting my daily fix.
While scrolling through countless gatekeepers’ memes mocking the wounded shepherd’s lost sheep, I thought to myself, what the heck am I doing on Twitter?!
I guess I should point out that I tend to avoid Twitter, aka “The Wild Wild West” of social media apps, because it really grinds my gears to witness the way in which complete strangers attack each other on the platform about the most random things. I once saw a thread where people attacked a user who claimed to not like ketchup on their hotdog!
However, it really doesn’t matter which comments section you deem as the most enthralling since all apps are created equal: to make a bunch of (white) men rich(er). As Andrew Lewis (as cited in Gillmor, 2011) reminds us, “if you're not paying for an online service, you're not the customer; you're the product.”
Undoubtedly, we’ve all come to the realisation by now that the more content you consume (and ads you click on), the wealthier all of these social media companies become.
However, many of us may not be aware of the fact that Facebook’s algorithm optimises for content that we have engaged with the most in the past in order to get us to stay on the platform and react, especially when that content is more likely to rile us up (Pelley, 2021). Simply put, the angrier the content, the more enticing the app.
I highly doubt that this news would come as a shock to anyone who has ever used Facebook, especially since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic. Can any of us even calculate the amount of time we’ve dedicated to mindlessly reading through the comments sections under anti-vaxxer content?
Unfortunately, the Chinese app, TikTok, has gone a step further. A recent change to TikTok’s U.S. privacy policy introduced a new section that says the app “may collect biometric identifiers and biometric information”, such as “faceprints and voiceprints” from its users’ content to enable “special video effects, for content moderation, for demographic classification, for content and ad recommendations, and for other non-personally-identifying operations” (as cited in Perez, 2021).
Furthermore, it states, “when you register, contact TikTok or upload content, TikTok collects your registration info (username, age, language, etc.), profile info (name, photo, social media accounts), all your user-generated content on the platform, your phone and social network contacts, payment information, plus the text, images and video found in the device’s clipboard” (ibid.).
This is especially troubling given that a recent Four Corners investigative report revealed that the app has also been secretly collecting data from kids (ABC News In-depth, 2021). In fact, the company has been fined millions of dollars for harvesting data from kids living in South Korea and the U.S. (ibid.).
Unsurprisingly, they have yet to specify what were their long-term plans for this vast collection of unethically sourced data.
But, I guess one of the major downfalls of living in The Information Age is that all data, whether ethically or unethically sourced, can be monetised, in some way of form, for years to come.
Leading many of us to wonder why would companies risk million dollar fines, innumerable lawsuits and irreversible damage to their brand image just to know how you take your coffee on mornings.
So, as I sip my Pumpkin Spice Latte while connected to Starbucks’ “free” Wi-Fi, I guess that the best (ironic) advice I can offer up to you is that until we figure out the ins and outs of the long-term social, political and economic risks associated with extensive data collection, we all have to remain vigilant about not only the content that we consume, but also about the content that we freely give companies access to.
Sources:
ABC News In-depth. (2021). TikTok: Eating disorders, racism, censorship and distorted realities | Four Corners. Retrieved October 8, 2021, from https://www.abc.net.au/news/2021-07-26/tiktok-algorithm-dangerous-eating-disorder-content-censorship/100277134.
Gillmor, D. (2011, July 13). Google+ forces us to question who owns our digital identity. The Guardian. Retrieved October 6, 2021, from https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/cifamerica/2011/jul/13/google-plus-online-identiy.
Pelley, S. (2021, October 4). Facebook Whistleblower Speaks to 60 Minutes. CBS News. other. Retrieved October 5, 2021, from https://www.cbsnews.com/news/facebook-whistleblower-frances-haugen-misinformation-public-60-minutes-2021-10-03/.
Perez, S. (2021, June 3). Tiktok just gave itself permission to collect biometric data on US users, including 'Faceprints and Voiceprints'. TechCrunch. Retrieved October 7, 2021, from https://techcrunch.com/2021/06/03/tiktok-just-gave-itself-permission-to-collect-biometric-data-on-u-s-users-including-faceprints-and-voiceprints/?guccounter=1&guce_referrer=aHR0cHM6Ly93d3cuZ29vZ2xlLmNvbS8&guce_referrer_sig=AQAAALjjV1l4zh0zfHnDG_hhxhiC6naV1CEme1JqA5xnsKoR86Ygisp1pDrAH6r43m50F2ac6frMSBXsUWqeqZ7Pujx5bR9XZIBf3V1yA1cgsTRW5BxWmjt47hOZrL5YHj12LRpPjRAiSm7L-Dbeg_KK0xru8_VtYPl8l_TdMT-1b5YP.