Why you’re data is so important to social media

Today, our lives are lived online. We wake up and a large percentage of us check our email on our mobile device. Followed by a check of our social media accounts. Chances are throughout the day we will keep checking our social media accounts and our email through the same devices.

Most weeks again a high percentage of people will also order from one or more stores online. All of the browsing we do on our social media accounts, ordering of products and searching for pages of knowledge through search engines creates a mine of information that is shared between providers, some of this data is used to target adverts at you while you’re browsing.

The inspiration for this article has come from another I read on Medium by Nat Eliason titled “Yes, You Should Delete Facebook”. I loved the story in Nat’s article about how a discussion he had in person with someone appeared to transpire to targeted adverts on Facebook. This poses the question, is Facebook listening to your conversations?

You can see how in certain situations, after a private face-to-face conversation has taken place, somehow related targeted advertising makes it’s way to your Facebook account, this is worrying right? Well of course not, why are Facebook not doing this? Simple, they don’t have to. Another excellent article on Wired covers this in more detail. Facebook doesn’t need to listen to your conversations.

As Nat says in his article “Facebook knows so much about you they can make you believe they’re listening to your personal conversations. They have so much data about you they can send you ads that have an uncanny relevance to what is going on in the real world.”

The problem is that while millions of people including myself are avid users of Facebook, we are all blind to the fact that we are the product, Facebook is a platform that we use to enable Facebook to generate large amounts of revenue through advertising. We are the product.

The harvesting of your personal data starts as soon as you sign up. You are asked to provide your name, date of birth, email address and your gender. Once you have completed your registration, you are then open to the collection of thousands of rows of personal data.

Every advert you click, any extended profile information, every computer you have logged into Facebook from, every friend in your network (even those you have deleted). This alone is a substantial amount of data giving an advertising platform a pretty good idea of what you like and what you don’t like.

It doesn’t stop there, every status update you post, every photo you update, every “Like” you make, every comment you make on your friends posts, your groups posts, pages posts, everything. Are you worried yet?

This is only just the beginning though, what happens when you start on third-party applications. Sure Facebook have developer guidelines, but they didn’t stop the Cambridge Analytica scandal. The organisation that worked for the President Trump’s campaign and allegedly obtained information on 50 million Facebook users.

Each of these third-party applications access different information from your Facebook profile. Facebook has cut down on the information it shares with third party apps. However, it has not been eliminated altogether. A report by Fractl found that all that personal data from Facebook and other accounts is being illegally sold on the “dark web” for little more than a few dollars. For instance, the firm found Facebook logins sold for $5.20 each while credentials to PayPal accounts went for an average of $247, reported MarketWatch.

While Facebook is in the spotlight of my article, they are not alone, other social media sites are the same. In summary, Facebook has become the success it is today because of us. We have enabled Facebook to make huge revenues based on advertising, the same goes for other social media platforms where the sole focus is advertising based revenue.

If you take away the concerns about the use of personal data, it’s actually a brilliant idea, give people a platform to stay in touch with your friends, find new friends, connect with people all over the world with similar interests, tell everyone about your relationship status and more.

Like Nat says in his article: “And since we’ve been sipping the Facebook friend juice for so long, it’s legitimately scary to quit. How will you know what events are going on? How will you know if something big happens in your friend’s life? How will you stay in touch with people?”

Facebook has become a part of millions of people’s day to day lives, the art of simple human communication is suffering because of it and our fascination for information has driven a dorm project from a social networking site to a machine which generates over $40bn (2017) of revenue in just 14 years of operation.

Going forward the choice is ours, I honestly believe with my technology background, at the time of creation, Zuckerberg had no idea what he was creating, what fortune he would be in for, he was a software developer, by the time he was attending Harvard he was recognised as a programming prodigy.

I believe (maybe in a naive way) that it is the ultimate investors and advisors that Zuckerberg had around him which changes a genuine social networking tool into a money making machine, one that is driven by our obsession with information.