Facebook knows more about you than the U.S. government
What we are afraid of is not the big data, but the way it is used.
Last month, I opened Taobao (a Chinese local website like Amazon) and found that the homepage recommended various macarons to me, which was really shocking because I hadn’t searched for any information about macarons on the app before. I only mentioned it when I had a conversation with my mum the day before. And I told her I wanted to eat macarons. So I suspected that I was monitored by Taobao, which is a really scary thing.
When people’s privacy is violated to a certain extent, everyone will feel fear. In this era of big data, on the one hand, we enjoy the convenience that data and technology bring to us, on the other hand, we have to always beware of personal information leakage. This reminds me of the movie “I, robot”. Humans create robots while they are wary of AI, so they write three rules in robots’ program to protect humans. One of them is not to harm humans at any situation. Intelligent programs can be written by human, however, the rules for using big data are difficult to write because the bounds of social ethics constraints cannot be easily defined and the degree of privacy violation that different people can accept is different. Can we selectively collect user information in a directional manner according to everyone’s personal wishes? Obviously impossible(at least at the moment). The dimensions of people’s personal data are too wide, even endless and updated at any time, and the current data collection programs cannot be as humanized as we hope. Therefore, in such an open Internet environment, the protection policies of user data and personal privacy are especially difficult to implement.
Amazon, TikTok, Facebook, Others Ordered To Explain What They Do With User Data
“Critical questions about business models, algorithms, and data collection and use have gone unanswered. Policymakers and the public are in the dark about what social media and video streaming services do to capture and sell users’ data and attention,” FTC Commissioners Rohit Chopra, Rebecca Slaughter and Christine Wilson said in a statement. “It is alarming that we still know so little about companies that know so much about us.”
As we all know, big tech companies like Google, Amazon and Facebook use our online activity to scrape bits and pieces of information about us, “which, in aggregate, reveal a startling amount of information about us — for example, marriage status, socioeconomic status, ethnicity, age or health, not to mention our purchases and preferences.”
“If you’re an avid Facebook user, chances are Facebook knows more about you than the U.S. government knows about you,” Warner told Axios. “People don’t realize one, how much data is being collected; and two, they don’t realize how much that data is worth.” (cited from Joshua Bote, How much is your data worth? A new bill could force Big Tech to reveal its value)
The Wall Street Journal has reported on how apps share user information with Facebook. The newspaper also recently revealed that Amazon was scooping up data from independent sellers and using it to create its own competing products. Amazon executives have denied this.
Here is the report “Apps Give Private Data To Facebook Without User’s Knowledge or Permission”.
“SAM SCHECHNER: Well, it could be your weight, if you’re having your period, your height, your blood pressure. We saw all of that kind of information being transferred from apps directly to Facebook servers in testing that we ran over the last few months.
KELLY: Yeah, you give an example of an app that allows women to track when they’re getting their period and ovulation. They enter that in, and then it immediately gets fed straight over to Facebook.”(cited from The Wall Street Journal)
As we can see, the personal data collected by Facebook covers all aspects, which is shocking and horrible. Facebook’s terms of service give it wide latitude to use that information for other purposes, such as targeting ads more generally, for personalizing their service, including the news feed, and for research and development.
Unlike Facebook, Google and Amazon claim that they neither sell user data nor use these status reports for advertising. They use user data only to improve their products and service quality. (cited from FRANCIS NAVARRO, KOMANDO.COM)
Should these practices be allowed to continue?
Many pundits now proclaim that “data is the new oil,” and we all pay gas taxes. However, an objection was raised by Antonio García Martínez, a former Facebook product manager and author of the 2016 tech tell-all “Chaos Monkeys.” “Their life data — their photos, their messages — they think that that’s being pimped out,” he said. “All of those life experiences, all that data you’re sharing, is completely ancillary to anything marketers are doing.”
He offered the example of BMW detecting that you once browsed a page on the BMW USA website, and then funneling that information into Facebook’s ad machine to deliver tailored advertising to you.
Whose data is that? Yours? BMW’s? Facebook’s? Delve into the reality of how online ads are bought and sold, and you realize that it’s far more complex than saying that your data generated so many dollars in revenue and you deserve a cut. Your data actually isn’t that valuable. Your attention is, and it’s easily taken away, as the #deletefacebook movement has suggested.
García Martínez objects to the “data is the new oil” metaphor. “Data exists within a certain context,” he said. The real value of data to a company like Facebook or Google is how it helps lure you to one of their services and keep you coming back. “The fact that you come and use a thing for free, that thing exists to sell your time.” (cited from Owen Thomas, San Francisco Chronicle)
Of course, many people may think that this is just a sophistry for Facebook to continue to use user data wantonly.
As far as I’m concerned, the abuse of data and the leakage of personal privacy are indeed headaches, but I won’t delete apps just due to privacy issues. Because the most important thing for me is to seek convenience. Compared to the industrial age when the Internet was not created, I love this era of big data even more. Because the good changes that data brought to the world are easy to see. Medias and platforms can provide better services based on users’ personalized data and continuously improve the products they provide. This is equivalent to infinite approaching intelligence. People always feel fear and disgust at things that are out of control, just like the robots in “I, robot”. The same is true for data. In fact, what people are really afraid of is not data, but data abuse. How to use data correctly, reasonably, efficiently and without infringing on human privacy is undoubtedly a problem that plagues technology companies.
As users, we shouldn’t verbally boycott or condemn platforms that are as cunning as Facebook, but need to learn to cleverly avoid traps which may leak personal privacy in the process of exploring software. From the perspective of marketers, detailed user data can obviously help us make more accurate and sensible decisions, but we must also collect information within the privacy range acceptable to customers. Otherwise, it will touch the bottom line of the customer’s psychology and be rejected. In short, the legal and reasonable use of user data is a problem that involves all levels of society. It cannot be easily solved, which requires us as users and marketers to be vigilant at any time.
