A Mysterious Web of Privacy

A decade ago, who thought about privacy breach or transparency issues?

No one, right.

Today before every click, we need to think whether our data is safe or not? OR, unknowingly what are the benefits we are providing our providers thru our data?

With the advent of social media, the more we share our data, the more risk we create towards our privacy.

It was not long before, when the biggest scandal of this decade unraveled. The scandal of Cambridge Analytica and Facebook. With this scandal we got a reality check, that these innocent looking social media channels have God like powers.

Due to our sharing habits, they know everything about us. From our names to our favorite diner to our relationship status, and they might even know whom are we going to vote in the next elections.

After this eye opening scandal, companies like Facebook are forced to focus on the privacy settings. People have stopped trusting these platforms. Resulting into multiple features in privacy settings in our accounts.

Like Instagram, who is tightening the third party access to user data. Let’s have a look what it is planning to do.

INSTAGRAM, THE ONLY SANE KID IN THE FAMILY

The Facebook-owned photo-sharing social network that has still managed to maintain its’s sanity is now adding a new feature that allows individuals to “manage all of the third-party services they connect to their Instagram account”.

As Facebook is facing millions of allegations after a thorny privacy issue with Cambridge Analytica, Instagram has taken a lesson and weeks after the fiasco it clamped down on developer access to its API (App developer investigation), limiting the number of API calls from 5,000 to 200 calls per user per hour. Adding to this now, Instagram is coming up with a new privacy setting where we can have a control on what we are sharing with different apps that are connected to our Instagram accounts.

Instagram said in a blog post, “Some examples include apps that allow you to easily print your Instagram photos or help you build a website. After connecting your account to a third-party service, you may grant them access to some of your profile information, such as your username and photos. Starting today, we’re making it easier for people to manage all of the third-party services they connect to their Instagram account.”

This will give us an authority on what we share with these third party apps and will also allow us to decline if we do not want to share our data with them.

But will this really help protect our data or not?

THE DAMAGE IS ALREADY DONE

Imagine, if you break a glass of water and then try to fill the spilled water again in the glass.

Not possible, right?

That is what I think, when it comes to privacy and data protection. We have already shared so much on our social media that there is no going back. My professor at NYU Joanne Tombrakos, rightly says that once something is on internet it never gets deleted.

And I totally agree to her. The information that we already shared before all these “privacy setting” is enough for all these apps and third party to survive for at least a decade. These privacy settings are just made to gain the lost trust in these companies. And we are getting trapped in this web of privacy. They have all the data they need to target us and we can never control it or have authorization no matter what they say.

But hope is the pillar that holds up the world. So, the only thing that we can hope is that from now on we will be more conscious about what we are sharing and how we are letting these companies use our data.

If these companies really want to make a change then they should give us more authority by choosing, what information we can share with them because right now it seems that either we share data with them or we don’t at all. There is no in between, but it would be great if we can have control over the data that we can share with these third party sites.

The only thing we can do is cross our fingers and just hope that everything will be fine. ;)

Please share your opinions on what you think about “privacy setting”

Thanks!

HM