SpicyMemoriesNew Contributor
Social Media and Healing
Hey everyone, and welcome to my TED talk lol
I feel I just need to vent about his a little bit.
Social media sucks. There’s a lot of well documented stuff about how people on instagram post pictures of perfect lives and people compare, which does a lot of harm.
My main pet peeve is with privacy.
I once had a friend come to me and say his mic was listening to him cause he’d spoken about a product and the product showed up in advertisements soon after.
The thing is, your phone microphone doesn’t listen to you. It doesn’t need to. There are probably thousands of other data points that it can use instead. The gyroscope, the rate at which you tap, purchase history, searches, etc… All of which cross referenced and used to track just about anything about a person. These are all aspects of data collection that are probably not widely understood or discussed. I was once told that “If you’re not paying for the product, you are the product.” That’s basically the entire business model of every social media company on the planet. These companies harvest the data of everyday people and sell it. Something I find violating, especially considering that the “consent” is given through Terms and Conditions screens that are engineered to get you to agree quickly and without actually reading.
The Privacy Act in Australia is almost comically outdated at this point too (it was made in 1988 before the internet even existed.)
Privacy isn’t just a privilege for keeping secrets. The Hawthorne effect is the easiest example to give for how this can affect people who are trying to heal. People act differently when under observation, even if it’s passive observation. Healing is messy. It’s inconsistent. It requires time and space and the chance to not have an audience while you figure stuff out.
It is excruciatingly frustrating to me that the majority of Silicon Valley is taking advantage of everyday people at their expense.
Does anyone else share this view?
