Confessions of a social media oversharer
Amid the fallout of the Facebook data scandal, Charlotte Lytton and Daisy Buchanan debate our need to go public
‘Can we really claim to have been unwilling collaborators?
At the age of 26 I am, by dint of millennial law, an app-happy permaswiper, dishing out personal data with reckless abandon. It’s
not that I want to grant access to my information willy nilly – in fact, I am near-chronically private when it comes to posting about my personal life online – but that, in the age of the sharing economy, I have come to accept that such details constitute currency for the “free” services that dominate our lives.
It was – of course it was! – a personality quiz shared on Facebook that this week reignited the debate about just what and where the information we share about ourselves actually ends up. App This Is Your Digital Life invited Facebook users to take their test in 2014, which a whistleblower has since revealed resulted in data from 50million people, such as their location, friends and “likes”, being obtained and then sold to Cambridge Analytica, a firm that has worked to develop techniques that could be used to influence voters.
For many, this is just the longawaited proof of the smartphone induced dystopian nightmare feared since the dawn of the social media age just over a decade ago. The burgeoning #deletefacebook movement is picking up steam. But can we really claim we have been unwitting or even unwilling collaborators in allowing conglomerates to mine our ostensibly innocuous preferences for their own ends?
From the Waitrose app that charts your most-purchased items and discounts them accordingly (I will take that 20per cent kale reduction, thanks very much) to the targeted ads formulated from your online browsing activity, which then follow you around the web, absolutely nothing is safe or secret anymore. And when you’ve doled out that information once – on a running app, perhaps, which monitors and then posts your location, or the food delivery service that knows just how many times you’ve failed to turn the oven on this week – hoping that a line can be drawn somewhere seems optimistic.
The reason I – we – part with this information so wantonly is because these apps do, on some level, make our lives easier or better; we want cheaper groceries, to see how fast that weekend run was, to switch off with a mind-numbing quiz in a brief period of downtime. For the companies who provide these services to expect something in return, then, doesn’t seem that unreasonable.
I can’t pretend I’m not perturbed when my phone notifies me of a “memory” from years past, grouping images I’ve taken during a particular time frame that it has pieced together by date and geo-tags (not even patchy internet signal from a Gambian study centre or remote Cuban tobacco farm has rendered these snaps immune). Or when an email from a fashion retailer lands in my inbox, having curated a shopping list for me based on prior purchasing activity (I can waste my money on fripperies without help, Asos!). But taking photos of my travels on a mobile has absolved the need for a camera; shopping via an app that provides express delivery, when you work long hours and are going on holiday the next day, has become a modern-day necessity.
So while I’ll continue to balk at the notion of posting a picture of my dinner, or posing atop a Nepalese mountain (truly sights nobody needs to see), and break out in hives at the thought of writing a sentimental status update, when it comes to my browsing and buying preferences and profiles, I’ll go on parting ways with my personals.
Yes, I hate the thought of every innocent tap or click being used for nefarious means in a data-harvesting factory in some remote corner of the globe. But this is the world we live in now and – ’twas ever thus – nothing really comes for free.