Privacy In Social Media
Imagine living in a glass house, where everyone outside can see what you are doing, but you can’t see who exactly is watching you. Now imagine being in a glass house amongst thousands of other glass houses: you can look into other people’s glass houses, watch what they’re doing, judge them, comment on them, while having the same process happening on you at the same time. And now imagine this: What if there are people outside all these glass houses, constantly collecting information on you, analysing data that you put out, and predicting your moves based on what they observed of you? In today’s digital age, that seems like a reflection of our lives, especially in the world of social media.
Most people must have clicked on this statement before: I agree to the terms and conditions. When you register for an online account, purchase an app, sign up for a mobile network operator service – almost everything that you sign up for nowadays, the first thing you need to do is to agree, to the terms and conditions drafted out by the service provider. But how many of us actually go through the long list of clauses and fine print before accepting them? Chances are, most of us just blindly sign, or click on ‘I agree’, and proceed with using the services.
While accepting the terms and conditions before signing up for something may seem pretty harmless, certain facts shown in the movie ‘Terms and Conditions May Apply’ may imply differently. When signing up for social media sites like Facebook or LinkedIn, we are actually agreeing on releasing our personal information and allowing them to be provided to third-party users. Accepting the terms and conditions of a mobile network operator might make it legal for wire-tapping and collection of our information by them. Legal actions can be taken just based on a simple post, simply because it seems suspicious to the people monitoring the information. With all this, I think it is safe to say that now in the digital age, privacy is not a luxury we can indulge in anymore.
The Oxford Dictionaries defined privacy as ‘A state in which one is not observed or disturbed by other people’, or ‘the state of being free from public attention’. As mentioned above, the information we put out on any digital platform can be monitored, analysed and used on ourselves. Platforms like Google and Facebook analyse the data you put out to determine the type and nature of posts you see, and the type of advertisements you should receive when you are on the internet. All information that you put out can be collected and stored in a huge database, available to be pulled out and investigated when needs be. On a more personal level, everything you post on the internet can be seen, judged and reacted upon by your audience, the ‘friends’ and ‘followers’ of your social media sites. With time, we have come to realise the types of posts that appeal to our ‘followers’, and have learnt how to craft our online personalities to generate more popularity and resonance. Writer and philosopher Tim Rayner compares this to French philosopher Michel Foucault’s insights on the effects of the Panopticon, a model of an ideal prison where prisoners in the cells are constantly being exposed to observation from the outside, but they themselves can never be certain if they are being watched. Foucault thinks this model allows prisoners to take responsibility in monitoring their own behaviour, with the conscience that they are being watched all the time. Rayner feels that in social media, we are living in a virtual Panopticon, and I agree with his take on this. Nowadays, we hone our online personalities based on the reactions of the people ‘watching’ us, and we too, watch and judge other people based on their social media appearances. We play to our audience, and regulate ourselves to be someone that achieves the most approval.
As privacy has gradually ceased to exist in the digital world, the only thing we can do is keep a strict watch on what we put out on the world wide web. In social media, if you’d like to avoid being associated with political or legal standings, posts related to these issues should be heavily moderated or just plain evaded. Personal posts and pictures about your private lives might have to go through a careful selection process – for all we know, the wrong type of persona portrayed in a social media platform might lead to you losing a job opportunity. As for judgements by the society, I guess there just has to be a balance struck between posting content that reflect our true selves, and content that appeals the most to our audience. As so much of our information nowadays can be collected and even sold to third-party users, a personal filter should probably be applied on things that we post online. As said by Eric Schmidt, executive chairman of Google, ‘If you have something that you don’t want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn’t be doing it in the first place.’ In this case, if there is something that you don’t want anyone to know, or be judged upon, maybe you just shouldn’t be posting it in public at all.
