The thinning personal digital space
[Personal Opinion Piece] (Originally posted on LinkedIN on May 20, 2018)
When Cambridge Analytica swept the internet and Facebook brimmed with Mark Zuckerberg’s robot-face memes, other social media platforms and portals were quick to send “Policy Updates” notifications to their users of which 91% probably won’t read them to know the difference. Nothing surprising here. Online community is engaging, and the urge to stay updated here is far more superior to the probable misuse of data sharing. Data is the price we pay for freely existing on most social media platforms. After all, how else can someone keep you interested without learning a good deal about you?
Facebook’s data leak was the extreme case of data learning and user manipulation for an intended output. The public outburst was not to dethrone elected officials for employed methods which were questionable on ethical grounds, but on consent.
“How dare you make me, let you get inside my head!” were the silent cries amongst the emotions of anger and fear.
Few years back, the online platforms were sorted — blazer clad picture for LinkedIN because it’s business; a casual-usual-me picture for Facebook for the way my family and friends knew me and the way-I-accept-me picture for Twitter for “it’s MY opinion out there”! The unwritten rules were subconsciously registered on what to share and with whom to share.
Things changed when Facebook started experimenting with its platform, even unethically for which Sheryl Sandberg apologized later. It began slowly with adding of separate lists for family and colleagues, because even as a professional, you do become “friends” and not all kinds of content are shared with people you work. Facebook read the mind-set for privacy and communication a long before Cambridge Analytica could think of having people’s psychological scatter plots. Text feed is emotionless without Emoji and hence efforts were extended to have both for status update. Later, a full good range of basic reactions were added to know, how exactly one functions deep down from the brain stem for a certain topic. Now, you can handpick people and separate them out for the kind of content you don’t want them to see. Facebook’s environment is complex, re-built from continuous testing of people’s privacy needs.
What about other platforms whose designs were later acquired by the giant?
Take Instagram for example. All you get to share are images and 1-minute videos. Visual content is powerful and probably that is what earned Instagram, millions of followers. The profile settings, however, I feel are little tricky. You can either go completely private or set yourself public. Moreover, one can see the list of people followed by public profiles of influencers.
How does it influence the low follower base accounts who are aiming to grow but also follow their friends and families? Are the close contacts vulnerable to online miscreants?
While it is completely human to share (and sometimes to show off) what we have, be it a materialistic possession, physical beauty or any form of art, it’s the dopamine hits in user’s head for being “liked” by the community, which keeps the platform alive. Till date, Instagram users only have two sharing options.
Interestingly and to my surprise, earlier this year, I came across Vero through my Instagram community. It is also a social media platform similar to Instagram differing majorly in social sharing settings. Users can select from “close friends”, “friends”, “acquaintances” and “followers” to share. A part of their manifesto says it all:
“PEOPLE NATURALLY SEEK CONNECTION.IN REAL LIFE, PEOPLE ARE NEVER PRESENTED WITH A ONE SIZE FITS ALL AUDIENCE. WE SHARE DIFFERENT THINGS WITH DIFFERENT PEOPLE. MOST SOCIAL NETWORKS REDUCE EVERYONE TO A FRIEND OR A FOLLOWER. THIS ENCOURAGES US TO ONLY SHARE THE PARTS OF OUR LIVES WE THINK ARE THE MOST INTERESTING. WHEN YOU CAN CONTROL WHO SEES WHAT, YOU CAN BEHAVE IN A WAY THAT IS MORE NATURAL, WHICH WE BELIEVE ENDS UP BEING BETTER FOR YOU.”
Vero’s one million downloads number in a brief amount of time is a strong indicator of how territorial we are even in our digital spaces and willing to draw a line.
Fast forward, a few years and Facebook acquired WhatsApp, an app that brought radical changes in how people communicated through their phones. SMSes became obsolete. All one needed was internet and a list of people one wanted to talk with. It was simple. However, here is the catch. Almost everybody who is there in your phone contact and owns a smartphone uses it. Where SMS did the sole of job of delivering a message, WhatsApp let people see your picture, read your opinionated status and inch closer towards your privacy.
Later, WhatsApp added features like Instagram stories with a life span of 24 hours and anybody in their list could see it.
Who were these people? Your close friends, your just friends, your family, your relatives, your acquaintances and some other contacts carrying different tags.
Before this feature introduction, we could share pictures privately without broadcasting.
Why does the broadcast feature make some of us to use it when the same activity could be carried privately in one to one chats? For acceptance? For show-off? For simply to share? Or for dopamine hits?
Months after the launch of this feature, Facebook announced 450 million daily active users of WhatsApp stories, 150 million for Facebook stories and now they are all set to earn from it through ads starting from the regions of U.S., Mexico and Brazil.
How much ads is too much ads?
Perhaps this Ted video by a techno sociologist Zeynef Tufekci can answer amongst other big questions of surveillance authoritarianism. [Highly recommended]
When WhatsApp announced business app, I anticipated separate lists for my contacts and ability to segregate “acquaintances” and “others” from my usual list. While that may or may not happen in future (I do hope that it happens), WhatsApp did take hints and updated privacy settings on who can see your pictures, last seen, status, location and read receipts.
All of this from one giant. What about other big social media platforms with different designs of communication?
When the news of data theft and manipulation by Cambridge Analytica was painted on Facebook’s back, Twitter didn’t get that attention for the same crime with probably more vulnerabilities. While the platform accepts on sharing random sample of public data and denies any sensitive data breach, data licencing revenues portray a different story. Unlike Facebook & Twitter, LinkedIN on the other hand did not make news for data sell but data breach in 2012. Size? 167 million users! What was worse? Four years later, it was known that the hacker posted the data in a Russian crime forum in the dark web. I need not write anything about the dark and anonymous side of it.
There is internet, there is social media, and over the years, the latter has become synonymous to the former in terms of usage, dominated by a few in their categories. A user is just a login away from updates by friends and families, from the latest news, from the probable next purchase. A walk past by a nearby park and Google asks for rating, take a selfie and it asks to put it on public forum, take multiple pictures and it stiches them together and makes a small animation.
Internet giants have dominated our lives to the degree where online existence without them is impossible. From holding an affordable smart Android phone, to one’s digital career footprint to online entertainment is held by few category owners and in the past few years we got to know how vulnerable they are to data breach if not data selling. The algorithms running on these platforms are AI capable, a powerful learning tool about humans that is continuously evolving without a consciousness. Cambridge Analytica was a proof of how vulnerable we are to our own psychological loopholes from the data we are incessantly feeding to these systems. Resonating strongly with what Zeynef Tufecki had to say in her Ted talk, I am concluding this piece by borrowing her words:
“We have a big task in front of us. We have to mobilize our technology, our creativity and yes our politics so that we can build artificial intelligence that supports us in our human goals but that is also constrained by our human values. We need a digital economy where our data and our attention is not for sale to the highest bidding authoritarian or demagogue.”
Originally published at https://www.linkedin.com.
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