Info we give up on social media
With only 68 likes on Facebook, people are able to predict your skin color and sexual identity with 95% accuracy. All it takes is ten likes for an online friend to know you better than your partner and friends, and 70 to be able to tell a lot about you.
The above information derived from researchers’ data at the University of Cambridge. Phoebus Papadakis, PhD candidate, reported their findings to the European Parliament. Despite concerns like the Cambridge Analytica scandal, social media is still going strong.
Speaking at the European Left event, Dr. Mark Cote offered data “the interesting thing is that after the Cambridge Analytica scandal and based on data from the last quarter of 2018, Facebook’s revenue increased, which shows that it was not particularly negatively affected. Ad revenue grew by 43.2% and all indications are that Facebook for 2018 will smash the €50 billion revenue bar.”
In the past two years, 90% of global economic data has been generated
He pointed out the personal data used to target users with ads. He then added the following. “There is no reason to accept a situation where our daily lives, our experiences, our experiences and our social relationships are increasingly forming by data points. No use where we only have a transactional relationship, as well as interference and infiltration of data points in our personal lives and influence and political processes.”
Papadakis pointed out that “There is a divide in modern democracy between those who generate data and those who control it. There is a need to address these phenomena globally. What can we do? Among other things, ensure transparency in software in order to increase user trust and also engage social science in the development of algorithms,” he added.
“Google and Facebook are ‘stimulating’ advertising spending
According to Jennifer Pymbus, some people are shifting their advertising spend from traditional media to social networks. “If you look at digital advertising, this industry has changed radically. In 2017, 57% of the industry involved two key players: Google, which attracted £63bn of advertising spend, and Facebook (£24bn). At the same time, the Guardian’s digital revenue was just £94.2 million – and that includes subscriptions, not just advertising. So those who want to advertise should go directly to these two companies. This is the big difference, felt over the last decade as a result of the abuse of our personal data.”
“No one, except simple me, should be able to control my personal data”
Criticism of social media has continually grown in recent years. The belief circulates that those who have money and power control it. Manal Alsharif explained, founder of the Women2Drive movement for women’s right to drive in Saudi Arabia.
Manal al-Sharif said: “From 60 million users in 2011 on Twitter, there are now over 300 million, after deleting 70 million fake or malicious accounts. Governments are targeting influencers on Twitter. For example, at the company’s Dubai offices they found the IP addresses of these people. One of them was tortured and killed. In 2011, at 2 in the morning and while my two-year-old son was sleeping, they sent police to my house to arrest me. Of course, on the other hand, if a neighbour had not tweeted about my arrest, I might have disappeared,” added Manal al-Sharif.
From dictatorships to democratic governments, every society uses social media to influence human behavior and political opinions. “No one but me should be able to control my data and sell it to whoever has the money. You’re selling your life, your asficial information and your personal information to a company. Personally, I’m willing to pay for social media that doesn’t control my information and that I can log out of without them keeping my personal data. At a guess, at $4 (subscription) a year, Facebook would not have the right to sell my information to brokers,” he added, citing blockchain-based technology and torrents and servers decentralized around the world as possible alternatives.
Underage digital natives and lack of critical thinking
A lot of minors in Europe use the internet on a daily basis – about 60% of them.
A recent study said that although 43% of children may think they know more about the internet than adults do, their abilities to understand critical thinking is not at a similar level, as Anastasia Karagianni, an expert on digital rights and child protection issues, said, and proposed the creation of a committee to promote legislative measures to better protect children’s personal data.
“If you had to share your mycotic fears, you would call the regime a tyranny, but at Google you share them freely and voluntarily.”
“Google is able to record even our most shallow fears and sell our profiles to advertisers. We give all this away for free, voluntarily. If we had to provide such data we would say it was tyranny,” argued Diego Naranjo from the European digital rights NGO EDRi.
Dimitris Papaevangelou created mediawatch.io, which allows one to search for the first source of a news item, follow its reproduction path and see if it was correctly reported.
“The level of misrepresentation of news and belief formation by the media is, in my opinion, much worse than what happens on social media. Evident becomes their way of use by people with institutional position in political and public discourse” he said.
Are there alternatives to Google? Qwant says “yes”
According to Leonard Cox, creator of Qwant, this search engine ensures and guarantees all of the above: “We are a European and ethical search engine that respects the promises it makes about: respect for privacy, neutral results, objective panorama, not personalised realities. There is a right to be forgotten on the internet.”
Qwant has been around for seven years and has grown a lot in the past year. They’ve now processed over 20 billion attempts to find information, which is impressive.
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Author: PC-GR
The World of Technology
