They're watching you

We lock our phones with personal passwords or our own fingerprint, clear our browser history and tabs, yet will go onto Facebook and will mindlessly like and share posts as a daily routine. It knows more about you than you realize. It knows what foods you prefer, the political group you associate with and even where you are.

Are we really as concerned about privacy as we think that we are?

Facebook currently has “more than two billion people and millions of organizations, companies, and political movements {that} offer up detailed accounts of passions, preferences, predilections, and plans” according to Siva Vaidhyanathan in chapter two of his book, “Anti-social Media”. He goes on to explain that “Facebook is the most pervasive surveillance system in the history of the world” and that the “commercial value of Facebook lies in its complete control of this priceless account of human behavior. We do the work for it, basically.  We like, share, comment, and interact with accounts that are similar to ours. We update our profile with our relationship status, age, hobbies, past and photos of special events in our lives. We are quite literally feeding Facebook with our information and not understanding the severity of the situation at hand.

There was a realization in my social media class, that most people know of these security and privacy issues, but still do not really care. They assume that because the government has always been “spying” on us in one way or another, than what is the difference between Facebook doing this now?

Facebook knowing everything about us is what many believe led to the outcome of the 2016 presidential election. Russians bought ads targeted towards certain people, and convinced a small majority of people in swing states, that Donald Trump was the better candidate when compared to Hillary Clinton. These tactics to specifically target certain groups of people is quite scary. By posting hateful and even false posts about a candidate, elections are no longer a democratic place, because is it really our choice if we’ve been coerced into believing that it is true?

How can we still feel safe on social media, knowing that Russians were meddling in our politics and deciding our political future on that same platform?

Yet, we still continue to spend an unbelievable amount of time scrolling and having our mental health deteriorated by Facebook and other social media platforms. I am also one of these people, and I admit that it is a lot easier to talk about Facebook being invasive than to actually quit altogether to protect yourself. It seems as if though even getting off of Facebook will not keep our information private, because if you’re in the contact list of someone who does have Facebook, then they already know what they need to. This is all sounds like some creepy cheap sci-do movie where technology is taking over the world, but frankly it is the reality we are living in.

No, Facebook is not exactly taking over the world, but the multi billion dollar company is changing the way our lives work without us even really noticing. Not only are we constantly giving our attention to the social media platform, but we’re giving it the “individualized” ways that we think. We like a post that has 20,000 likes already, and think nothing of it, but we are telling Facebook, “These 20,000 people and I have this in common!” Which gives them a literal platform to exploit you with. If Facebook knows that you are just like everyone else, then it makes it that much easier to sway you into believing certain things or in a certain way. Because, think about it, the posts on your news feeds are already filtered towards your desires, beliefs, and even morals.

Mark Zuckerberg, the creator of Facebook, is now claiming that he wants government regulation over political speech, so that certain content will be taken down if it’s influencing votes or going too far politically. Although with government regulation stepping in now, I am not sure if Facebook will continue to thrive like everyone else is saying it will.

Facebook is known as a strong social networking platform that some people depend on to make a living, play games or just connect with family/friends. Yet, Facebook continues to have multiple security breaches where countless users information is exposed to the public. With it also limiting people’s freedom of speech, and now proposing that the government begin to get involved, Facebook may not have the long run that everyone thought it would. People can say that privacy has never been an option, but even having the mindless games obtain your information just for the sake of advertisements is overboard! Facebook ads will just become the “new way” that the government will be able to control us, just like the way the 2016 election was controlled by Facebook.