Wake-up call for social-media users

Maybe it’s time to update your Facebook status to “compromised.” Recent revelations about the social-media giant’s failure to protect data from being used for nefarious purposes have raised concerns among users and spawned a new hashtag-propelled trend to #deletefacebook.

More importantly, perhaps, the scandal involving the data-mining firm Cambridge Analytica’s theft of data connected to 50 million Facebook users - which was subsequently used to influence public opinion and behaviour in the 2016 U.S. presidential election - has forced socialmedia users to reconsider the consequences of all the friending and following they do on a daily basis.

The controversy surrounding Cambridge Analytica has been fuelled in large part by information provided by whistleblower Christopher Wylie, a Canadian who worked for the British firm as head of research and was deeply involved in its activities related to the U.S. election and Britain’s “Brexit” vote.

Wylie’s revelations about the dark realities of data mining and the manner in which online information can be used to influence attitudes and behaviour are nothing new to those who understand the realities of the digital age. But for the vast majority of computer users, who click “Agree” on any number of terms-of-service declarations without ever reading a single word of them, the controversy has served as a wake-up call about what they’re risking when they engage in social-media activities.

Every website you follow, every social-media post you like, every person or thing you friend or follow, every online purchase you make - it’s all information that is recorded, compiled and distributed across various platforms and used to craft messages designed specifically to influence your future behaviour.

Maybe the intention will be to get you to buy another pair of sneakers, based on the sites you’ve visited in the past. Or perhaps the plan, decidedly more nefarious in its intent, will be to capitalize on attitudes, interests and political inclinations revealed by your online behaviour by crafting messages and/or misinformation that might push you toward a specific ballot-box choice.

Either way, your every online move is being watched. The Facebook/Cambridge Analytica firestorm has pushed a large number of mostly ignored concerns into frontand-centre status for the computer-using public, and it’s a reminder we would all be wise to heed.

As many observers of media technology have noted, if you’re doing something online and it’s free, you aren’t the customer; you’re the product. Someone else is paying for the information your activity is helping to create.

Look at it this way: Facebook is free to its friend-seeking users. Facebook is also a company with a value that has topped half a trillion dollars. The share-value losses incurred by the company in the wake of the recent scandal topped US$60 billion, but Facebook is still worth more than US$470 billion.

Those aren’t numbers one could clear-headedly associate with a “free” service. Which is why logging onto Facebook - or, perhaps, making the hashtag-inspired decision to delete it - makes you more than a social-media user; it makes you a valuable statistical commodity.

So now you know. And if you happen to be reading this online, someone out there probably knows you know.