Users’ data and Social Media

I took Mass Media and Society last semester. This course mainly discusses how different types of media evolve in people’s daily life and affect people’s living habits. It pointed out a significant idea of how television make money when it has the largest amount of audience, which is advertisement. And now, the internet became the media with the largest amount of audience, and the way of making money didn’t change, it is still advertisement. However, the advertisement targets the audience more specifically by using the data that are collected by every social media platform.

Facebook is totally free, so does Instgram, Snapchat, Weibo and etc. You can use any function and services on these social media platforms without being charged. And users get used of seeing advertisements appear between posts. I believe most of the users, though they didn’t read the user policy before they registered any social media platform account, are aware that social media platform is collecting their data and using these data to target advertisements on their homepage. Since Facebook is a free social media platform, I think it is acceptable that they are using users’ data as a database for advertisements and technique updates. And for my personal experience, I do interest in some of the advertisements and content that they recommend to me via the information they get from me. Collecting these data is also important for social media to build up a database that served to provide better service to users. For example, Facebook is able to recommend potential friends to you by matching your education or work background with others who share the same background, Weibo can show you the local news of your city. All these functions and services are based on your personal information that you provide to social media platforms.

However, leaking the data to another company is totally a different story. I think when Facebook is using users’ data, it is responsible to take care of users’ data to prevent any third party to get access to it. In this case, it is obvious that Facebook lacks protection of data. This is very dangerous because the third party is out of Facebook’s control, we are not sure about where will these data and how will them be used? Will it bring negative affect to the users? And it does because Cambridge Analytica is using these data to help Trump to win the election. If it is a national crisis, some personal crisis can do harm to users easily. For example, the third party get your personal information and decide to use them to swindle, it not only affect users, but also affect users’ friends, parents and other relatives.

I agree that social media can collect users’ data because it helps the social media platform to provide better services. However, this kind of usage should be under certain regulation or limitation. For example, absolute responsibility and priority on protecting data, notification of the usage of data to users, and absolute no permit of selling data to others. Nevertheless, none of these regulations can be executed and supervised easily, there is still a long way on balancing the range of using users’ data.