What do our social media accounts really know about us?

Privacy concerns are nothing new when it comes to the masses of online profiles we acquire just by existing in the digital age. Docu-dramas like Jeff Orlowski’s The Social Dilemma paint our social media apps as omniscient algorithms that can manipulate us into using their platforms with an addictive nature. These algorithms know us to our core, and know exactly what to place in our feeds to keep us scrolling.

This narrative, highly dramatized in The Social Dilemma, faced criticisms for its disconnect from the realistic stories told by the former tech executives who agreed to be a part of the film. But, after watching it I couldn’t help but wonder: What do our social media accounts really know about us that keep us glued to their platforms? I took to Google to find out.

The photo above shows the demographic data Google has gathered about me (and chosen to share in my account settings). I turned off location services, search history, and personalization on Google over a year ago, so my profile isn’t very accurate. According to Google, I am an 18–34 year-old man who enjoys cars and American football, when in reality, I’m an 18–34 year-old woman who doesn’t have a car and has never made it through an entire football game at her Big Ten university.

However, If I’d allowed the default levels of data saving, I could’ve searched through an interactive map of every location Google had recorded for me as well as all of my web/app history. Even if all this data was only being used for targeted ads, this level of surveillance does not sit well with me.

Privacy concerns are front-and-center in the tech industry, and rightfully so. Every tech corporation will tell you that they don’t sell your data. But, they do sell access to user data. Sounds semantic, right?

Maybe Friedrich Engel’s 1872 theory that increased technology leads to an increased need for authority isn’t so far off (Winner, Do Artifacts Have Politics). Tech giants like Google want to convince their users that they are in control of their own privacy. But in reality, without regulation of private companies’ access to your personal information, we don’t know what happens when you opt out of personalized ads, and we can’t avoid their algorithmic allure without giving them up completely.

So, for now, we as users either have to get comfortable without online privacy or find a way to live non-digitally in the digital age.