Is Facebook stealing your life?
Facebook has been accused of stealing personal information and data from its users without asking for their permission. Months later after the hearing, we are wondering has anything really changed?
Social media in general steal a lot of our life away. How? Simply by wasting too much time on them on a daily basis. Also, with the sponsored advertisements that make us think that we need all those products. By making us feel like lesser humans since we are not that fit/rich/famous etc. These are some practical ways in which Facebook steals your life away. But there are the more ominous ways in which the famous social platform steals personal data about you and quite literally steals your life.
Mark Zuckerberg’s Capitol Hill hearing revealed what we all feared. That our personal data are not only stored but mined from various sources and then sold out. From completing funny quizzes, to pressing Like on posts, Facebook’s algorithms collect our data and store them away. With this data they can target us with advertisement based on our preference or sell out our preferences to companies like Cambridge Analytica.
Democratic ideas are about freedom of choice but apparently Facebook chooses to ignore it, by feeding our voting preferences to companies which can later manipulate electoral results. Imagine you’re indecisive about who to vote, Facebook’s algorithm picks it up from your likes on posts, quizzes etc. Then a party wants to win a certain state, Facebook through intermediate companies can sell the demographic information they hold of and with the right sponsored posts, can change the results. Despite the assurance that they were investigating the issue since 2015, nobody can guarantee that this won’t happen again.
It’s one thing having someone selling your shopping preferences to advertisers in order to bombard you with unnecessary stuff and another to assist manipulate elections. Knowingly or not, Facebook has the manpower and money to control as to how our personal information is shared. Where is our freedom of speech then? When our posts can be resold or persecuted? Even if I set my profile completely private, the main outlet which is Facebook, will still be able to receive crucial information about you. And it’s not just Facebook, Google runs a face recognition as well as a locator and so do many other social media outlets.
Lately, with all these controversial reports coming back I feel that we are all in a huge aquarium being observed by the power players. Even if we go ahead and delete or social media presence, still our data will be stored away in a server somewhere. Is there a way to stop this? Can we somehow protect ourselves completely? Will social media continue stealing our lives away?
Do you feel like your privacy is violated?
Author: Marina Symeou
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