What I did was to open a fake email account and a fake facebook account with it. It takes around 5 minutes to do so, and I can choose any profile photo I want, I can pretend as whomever I want.
Then I searched for public groups like local pubs, cafes, bars, sports yoga clubs, religious communities, political groups, hairdressers, gatherings, reading groups, recent and upcoming events ... whatever you can think of, whichever type of life you want to look at.
The rest is just browsing, looking at the comments, likes to posts, clicking on anyone’s profile I wish, browsing profile and cover photos, reaching their friends by the comments and the likes in the photos, reading the conversations, opening fifty tabs to look at. Browse, browse, browse, jumping from a person to another.
And there I find you. I have no idea of who you are and we probably will never meet in real life. You don’t even know that I exist, but I know a lot about you. I know your family and your best friends, which schools you went, where you work. I saw the party you went three years ago and got wasted, I saw your hot beach photos, I know the places where you spend your time, I know your travels and vacations. I know much about your fun and happy moments, but I don’t know too much about the other stuff that you are going through.
You know that it is up to me to send a message to you unless you disabled it (%99 of profiles), and if I want I can disturb you for a second or even much more if I use the right first message and profile photo.
I can also find you in real life if I want to, and if I want to, I can use the information to my advantage. I can do this without having a single friend if you appeared in any public content by a like or a comment.
How do you feel about this? I know that this became the normality of these days, but please take yourself back a second and see how crazy this is. All of us are tricked into this madness. This is a machine to waste humans’ time, that collects information and uses it to manipulate and take advantage of them.
Looking back, really whose idea was it to expose our real identities and personal lives online at this level of intimacy? These were not ordinary people, think about it… the same groups and communities also initiated the other networks like twitter, instagram… Do you see the long con?
