Majority of the people don’t give a shit about privacy because it doesn’t harm them. But think deeper, the information that uploaded to your social media gives the internet companies more ways to sell your data, most of the buyers are the advertisers.

The more data they have, the more accuracy for them to place the ads in your page feeds. It sounds ok right? Well data is good for targeting, but it’s good for manipulating as well. We will come back to manipulating later.

Let’s discuss why you shouldn’t live with social media.

  1. Social media is not free

    Remember this social media is not a free photo album to keep your memories. You can always keep your photos in your own hard drive. Keep it in other cloud store (not Google Photo – here is why) like Dropbox, iCloud etc. If you want to showoff (admit it, you do most of the time) in social media please do it, but this is definitely not your memory keepers.Why it’s not free? Facebook, Instagram, Twitter are not a non profit organisation, they are worth of Billions right now. They rely on advertising to profits their shareholder. And how are they able to sell more advertising? By simply showing you non relevant ads? Their ads are targeted for you. Base on your “online diary”.In another way, you provide your information to these companies because you wanted to “share your happiness” with the world, these companies eventually tell the advertisers that you love to travel and always went to fine dining and sell the advertising slots to them.When you upload a picture taken from your camera these are the hidden information that will send along too,
    – Date and time of the original
    – Geo-location data
    – The model of camera and its settings (exposure time, aperture value etc.)
    – Copyright information
    more info hereThese are the meta data that store in your photo. Besides on these meta data, these companies analyse your photos and label them along. The easiest way to find out is to view your website’s source code.

    This is a pretty standard freemium business models, harvesting data and sell them to earn money. We as a user have the rights to know that in exchange this “free” usage of the platform, we must provide them our information for free. Unfortunately, most of us don’t give a shit about it. I’ve a suggestion here, instead of provide your data for free, why not sell them along? If these social media companies earns, you should be part of them right? Because your supplies your data to them. Be smarts.

  2. They can manipulate you

    Facebook’s newsfeed isn’t random. What you see is all planned and set by their data science with their well trained AI. The reason of having all these sophisticated technologies on your newsfeed is to have you keep scrolling your Facebook.  Read more here: 7 Specific Tactics Social Media Companies Use to Keep You HookedHave you every felt angry or sad or whatsoever emotion when you seen some posts on your newsfeed? There are tons of happenings around the world when you are reading this article but you can’t feel what’s happening out there because you are not there. But when you open your Facebook account, all of suddens you saw the things that happening around the world weather if is a political news, war news, disaster, someone married, and you felt something. We human is a emotional driven  creature, we make decision majority is by our emotion instead of rational. Read more here: Facebook reveals news feed experiment to control emotionsThese information/news that shown on your newsfeed have the power to manipulate you from making decision including your spending, voting etc. Read more here: Online Manipulation: All The Ways You’re Currently Being Deceived

  3. They track you from head to toe

    Your parents nor your friends will no longer understand and know the real you. Maybe even you yourself won’t probably know too. The one who really understand you are these big company. Start from your searching, and your chatting with your friends and the information your posted in your social media. All these has been analysed to understand what’s your behaviour, what you are interested in the past, present and maybe the future too. We basically without any sense of self guard posted our activities naturally in the social media. Where have you been, what you have done, all has been recorded in it. It’s your personal journal, but you didn’t keep it privately for your own, you store it in the big data farm where these keepers harvest it  for their beneficial.  See more here – https://techcrunch.com/2015/10/24/when-facebook-knows-you-better-than-you-know-yourself/In Facebook they track your conversion between your friends in Whatsapp (they brought it), and Messenger. Try the follow experiments,Facebook’s newsfeed doesn’t show all your friends’ posting, they may skip some because you have too many friends and Facebook has too many ads to display to you. So they will pick people who you recently interacted before or people who recently interacted with you before. By interacting which means either both of you had conversation before or you clicked, liked, responded his or her post or stalk him or her.Try to look for a guy that you can think of but you rarely see his post before. Send a Messenger message to that guy and have a short chat with him or her. Soon you will see his or her post appear in your newsfeed. But this won’t last, Facebook’s algorithm are made to make sure you stay on your newsfeed as long as possible. It will still continue show you things that they think it’s interesting for you.

 

*The above article is base on author’s knowledge & assumption. It doesn’t have a deep investigation to prove it’s right or wrong.