To Regulate or Not To Regulate

Cambridge Analytica was one of the most technological advances in political advertisements that caused a lot of panic within the American Population. The trust in social media wavered as people wondered if social media was taking information without consent. Within the Cambridge Analytica scandal, they took info not only from the consenting users who downloaded the app but they also took information from the friends of those users who most likely did not consent to this breach of privacy. This whole interaction now begs the question: Should social media be responsible for regulating this sort of content?

When it comes to privacy, people have mixed feelings about this. Some people are okay with social media giving out their information to cater the ads to those preferences. Other people feel that social media should not take any information from your profile for any reason because it is a privacy breach. I am in the gray area between these two. I am okay with social media taking info about my interests like what I like to listen to, what I like to play, actors/artists that I like. I am okay with this kind of information being used. But when it comes to more personal information like my location, political affiliation, job, daily routine, that’s when I get a little skeptical. Like, I don’t enjoy it when websites that do not need my location request access to my location. It gets too much when they start to track my activities, like when google tells me how long it takes me to get to work in my notifications.

So when it comes to regulating the privacy data, I believe that social media should regulate those that information. However, I believe that the first way to get regulation started would be a level of transparency. We all know that most social media if not all try to use their terms and policies to get users to agree to something they might not agree to. That’s why they’re normally written in small letters and pages long, to get people less interested in reading. If they were to regulate that information, social media needs to be transparent with their plans for our data.

So I believe that this would start by having a separate section in a legible font explicitly stating what they will be collecting and what for. I also believe that ALL social media should give you a choice on what they can use. I do believe that some social media platforms do this now. For example, Facebook when you use it for other third-party applications they give you the option on what they can share with said third-party. All third parties should be able to give this option out, not only for the users to regulate it themselves, but this will also put part of the accountability on the users themselves so that if the social media uses information, they have explicit say that they can. If the user doesn’t like that then they can delete that information themselves