Each and every year, the already colossal presence of social media seems to get bigger and bigger. Platforms such as Twitter and Facebook are very likely the leading means of sharing ideas in the current day and age, and this trend shows no sign of slowing down. Much of the growth of such platforms is due to their accessibility, which is in part due to the ability of anyone to sign up for free. Though there is indeed no monetary cost, users of these platforms pay their way in using their personal data. Most users of social media are aware that their data is shared with advertisers, and it seems as though their acceptance of this fact grows greater and greater each year; most of us may remember a time when we were told never to put any of our personal data online, yet in 2015 90% of young adults reported that they used social media (Pew Research Center).
Even if we’ve come to be more tolerant of the online sharing of personal information, it would seem that this increased permittance is not enough for internet companies— recently, it was discovered that contrary to their own statements, Facebook gives your phone information used for two-factor authentication to advertisers (Gizmodo). It’s a rather insidious scheme; first, they tell you to give them more information for the sake of protecting your information, and then they turn around and throw that information back out to the highest bidder. That Facebook lied about this practice before being found out shows that it’s difficult to trust anything that uses your data for benefit— who knows whose shady practices will next be revealed?
This big question of all of this is really “Who cares?”, and it’s that which I believe to be interesting to look at. I know that in the recent past most have not worried themselves about personal information, as supported by the rise of social media. Anecdotally, two of my best friends have in the past joked at my apparent paranoia, with one telling me in no uncertain terms that I was crazy. However, I think we might begin to see a change in this stance. The Facebook example is just one example of what I believe to be the current insecure environment of social media, and another recent such example involved the Google Chrome web browser. The recent Google Chrome version 69 update made a somewhat worrying change for those who prefer to minimize their tracking by advertisers; in that version, logging into a Google site would also log you into your Google account within the browser, attaching that browser’s data to your account (TechCrunch). While this may seem surprising, something came soon after which to me was even more so— in Chrome 70, they backtracked on the change, and now, users will be able to opt out of this feature (Digital Trends). In this case, there were enough Chrome users who both valued their privacy and spoke out about it that Google decided to undo their decision.
To me, this seems like the average internet user may be moving back towards caring about their online privacy, which is a very interesting (and in my opinion, great!) development, likely supported by scandals such as the aforementioned Facebook incident. Social media has in its growth presented a struggle between the ability of ideas to be freely shared and the ethics of the harvesting of data in order to subsidize its cost. Now, it would seem as though even if people do not largely prioritize ethics, they at least recognize and think on the question. While it is thus impossible to know where things will go, I am hopeful that this recent bit of news is an indication of a restoration of control over ones data to that who it belongs to.