Big Brother is Watching- So Is Facebook
When was the last time any of us have read a platforms terms of service? If you don’t know what that is, its most likely you are like the rest of us who simply check off the little box at the bottom with little regard for the power that it entails. Most often these include what a company can do with the data they collect from you as a user, and what your limitations are as a user of their service.
The social media behemoth Facebook is no different than any other company and requires you to essentially sign off your right as a user to preserve your own usage data. Terms of service may also differ depending on the country from which you are accessing the service from, for example if you are using Facebook outside of the United States or Canada, the company says you are in an agreement not with Facebook Inc, but instead Facebook Ireland inc. Delving further into the topic, these terms of service are really important when it comes to data mining as it outlines exactly what Facebook records how they record it, and what they can do with it.
Filed under “Data Policy” you can find exactly what kind of muscle the company has in terms of controlling your data. For example the company claims it can and will use demographic information such as location and age to educate advertising partners on who has views their ads, how many people have downloaded the app being advertised. In other words the company sells your information at a premium to people who use your cookies to know exactly what you are interested in and what will most likely appeal to you as a 21 year old female from Toronto, Ontario who has searched the web for cat sweaters for your hairless sphynx cat. But seriously, how many times have you been searching for a hotel on Google and found that your Facebook ads have been taken over by discount hotels? That’s the kind of power they have.
The company also says it tracks your geographic location based on GPS coordinates, IP address, WiFi connections, time zone and mobile phone number. Meaning the company is allowed to track you all over the Earth just because you didn’t feel like reading the terms of service. If that doesn’t make you feel like you’re living in George Orwell’s 1984 then I don’t know what will.
The social media site does say however you can control how much they can take from you under your privacy settings. To be truthful, this is probably the first time i’m even opening my privacy settings, and there is not a whole lot you can do to prevent Facebook from selling and mining your data.
Still, there must be an appeal to the platform since we knowingly allow it to invade our privacy. All this so we can watch silly videos of cats or see your crazy aunt Mary spit political nonsense out into the interwebs- of course! There is something about us humans that love being connected to others, and Facebook allows us to do this with relative ease. Think of all of our parents who struggle to even turn on the computer yet still have a Facebook account. We as a society continue to accept surveillance as just a natural part of our lives, something our grandparents and their parents never could even fathom. Looks like we can never escape this 1984-esque dystopian as long as we are citizens of the web, however my advice to you is read the terms of service or even ctrl-F straight to the parts about privacy and data just so you know exactly what rights you have given up!
