Social Media privacy: Big Brother is watching you

Socialising or Publicising

 The world we live in has undergone a major paradigm shift, in terms of how we communicate but more importantly in terms of the level of control or the lack of it, over the content that we communicate.

We have gone from being “private-by-default, public-through-effort” to one that is “public-by-default, private-with-effort” as aptly put by Microsoft principal researcher Danah Boyd.

When people communicate with each other on Facebook for instance, what is meant to be a social interaction between the individual and a group of friends has the potential to become a form of publicity, eclipsing the lifestyle, interests, worldview and idiosyncrasies of the individual and his/her friends, depending on the privacy settings.

Therefore, it is pertinent to have control over our social media platforms, because our fundamental rights of privacy are in jeopardy more than ever before.

The illusion of control

Having a password, switching your settings to private, changing passwords regularly and not using predictable passwords like surname or date of birth and so forth, can be useful ways to prevent your account from hacking and gives you control over it.

However, it is does not necessarily prevent organisations like Facebook from having access to your data and manipulating such data as they dim fit. In fact, it is safe to say that the culture of surveillance is upon us.

Data Mining, Digital Footprint and Data Shadow

Surveillance was defined by D Lyon as any collection and processing of data, whether identifiable or not, for the purpose of influencing or managing those whose data has been garnered.

Thus, it has become very easy to identify an individual, just from his or her web browsing habits and organisations such as AOL profile millions of data containing vital information belonging to users and release these data to researchers, albeit “anonymous”.

The popular saying “on the internet, nobody knows you’re a dog” isn’t completely accurate any longer, because you live a digital footprint or “data trail” of your activities wherever you visit.

From search engine logs, to social network sites, emails, mobile phone calls, CCTV even online purchases and public transport routes are all monitored.

We are constantly being watched either by the government or state under the guise of security or by our employers under the guise of productivity, even work colleagues and friends keeping an eye on what you do and how.

In 2013, the Guardian published an article revealing how the National Security Agency NSA was evading people’s privacy in the US, monitoring Google’s user data religiously as exposed by Edward Snowden who is now wanted by the US government.

The UK as well have their own version of this, named the communications data bill a.k.a “snoopers charter”. They monitor websites we visit, our instant messages, our friends and social media interactions, even the length of internet calls.

And for places like Iran, Egypt, parts of the middle-east, China and North Korea-what you have is a complete internet censorship, underlying the statement that Government is in control of how you communicate.

Does anonymity translate to privacy?

You can make yourself anonymous and protect yourself from being tracked online by hiding your IP (internet protocol) address. 

Your IP address has the capacity to uniquely identify your internet connection and your geographical location, therefore it’s paramount to obscure your header, but it does not protect your information- that requires encrypting your data.

If you’ve got nothing to hide, you’ve got nothing to fear

The government, in an effort to justify mass surveillance have suggested it is needed to catch terrorist. 

The process may not be lawful and what is considered lawful may change from time to time, but “if you have nothing to hide, then you’ve got nothing to fear”.

But it appears the much-favoured mass surveillance doesn’t really work.

What you get is some false sense of accomplishment, possibly a positive identification of a huge number of potential threat, then another huge number of innocent people documented as potential threat, then actually missing a decent number of the real threats and so forth.

The thought that you are being constantly watched and recorded, even if you’re not committing any crime is unnerving. Worse still, the government can use this system to go into your past and accuse you based on your former interactions or indiscretions as observed by Edward Snowden.

It is safe to say, that if you have said anything on the internet that you ought not to have said, you should be worried.

Self-induced Surveillance

Unfortunately, majority of users contribute to and co-operate with the enemy in their own monitoring by participating in online survey, either in the bid to win an iPhone or download some free app.

It is shocking that a lot of people are aware of online surveillance but continue to provide personal information and perpetuate tracking through indiscriminate use of social media.

It turns out that most users are more worried about being exposed to the people that they know than having it monitored and manipulated by government agencies and corporate bodies.

The willingness to surrender personal details to web organisations, despite the dangers associated to it is a type of resignation that occurs when a person believes an undesirable outcome is inevitable and feels powerless to stop it according to Naughton.

The Facebook conspiracy theory

Facebook has been accused severally of sharing user information without their consent, a constant change in the default privacy settings and deliberately making the privacy settings complex to discourage users from protecting themselves.

It has also been alleged to have CIA links, with a centralised surveillance system which although lacked credibility, but raises serious concern.

In her defence, Facebook does appear to be doing enough to address the issues, as recent studies show that users are more privacy savvy and a lot of young users do manage their privacy settings effectively.

Frequent users are more likely to change their default settings while the least skilled are less likely to.