Sharing on social media comes with a hefty price
After last year’s Facebook data scandal, we ought to know better
The first time I saw a selfie stick, wielded by family of east Asian tourists in Bangkok, I was shocked. People were literally so obsessed with taking pictures of themselves at the perfect angle – rather than, say, asking someone else to take one, or not taking one at all – that someone had invented a special telescopic gadget? That cost money, and that people actually bought?
What days of innocence! Since my first glimpse of the selfie stick, photo-sharing apps such as Instagram have taken over the world. I now barely twitch when I see a pair of friends duck-facing into a selfie-stickheld phone camera, or a lone woman pouting in public as she makes eyes at herself for her phone, red nails splayed over its back.
Other people’s photos, like their dreams, used to be considered notoriously dull – nobody wanted to see more of Auntie Sarah’s snaps of the Eiffel Tower or trip to London Zoo. Photos are no longer boring. They’ve become the currency in a vast and addictive game: that of endless, bottomless narcissism. If we used to point the camera out at the world and bore our friends, now we preen and pout at our own lenses, inviting our friends to admire, like, love, comment, compete and compare – safe in the knowledge we’ll do the same for and to them.
Well, the urge to capture and share images of ourselves is increasingly landing us in trouble. Witness the mega-scandal that erupted last week when it turned out that FaceApp, a madly popular photo-sharing app owned by a Russian company called Wireless Labs, has nasty terms and conditions that gives it carte blanche to use users’ personal data in any way it wants – forever.
In case you’ve been spared its charms, FaceApp allows a user to take a selfie, then, using AI, morphs it into a much older version of the person – you can also use it to make yourself look much younger, or smiling, or the opposite sex. It’s been around since 2017, but off the back of a truly bizarre “age challenge” – inviting people to post pictures of themselves looking old – its popularity soared last week, making it number one in Apple’s app store. Celebrities from Courtney Cox to pop stars the Jonas Brothers took part. (Detached from any kind of campaign to make wrinkles and grey
hair glamorous, it seems to be a way for the selfie-taker to boast about their actual relative youth and good looks.)
Anyway, so strong was the urge to participate in the “age challenge” selfie craze – and in all previous selfie opportunities provided by the app – that users have simply been signing on the dotted line, barely registering and apparently not caring that they were giving up all rights to their data.
Then last week, at the height of the craze, Joshua Nozzi, a software developer, sounded the alarm, accusing FaceApp of snarfing up users’ entire photo-roll, whether pictures were uploaded to the app or not. That turned out not to be true, and Nozzi has since retracted his initial accusation.
But by then people were interested and began looking closely at FaceApp’s terms and conditions. Users of the app, people suddenly realised, sign over “a perpetual, irrevocable, non-exclusive, royalty-free, worldwide, fully-paid, transferable sub-licensable license to use, reproduce, modify, adapt, publish, translate, create derivative works from, distribute, publicly perform and display your User Content and any name, username or likeness provided in connection with your User Content in all media formats and channels now known or later developed, without compensation to you.” Nasty.
A cascade of indignation and horror was duly unleashed: users had been duped into surrendering their privacy and personal data for free! Here was exploitation and terrifying chaos!
However all-encompassing those terms and conditions, the furious, panicked response struck me as misplaced. Firstly, this wording is commonplace in social media services – we just prefer to ignore it.
Then there’s the fact that, after last year’s Facebook data scandal, we ought to know better. In 2018, it was revealed that Facebook had been selling millions of users’ data without their knowledge to Cambridge Analytica, a political consultancy, to be used to influence political outcomes. The lesson was crystal clear: social media companies give us a global platform for self-promotion, and they exact a price in return: the surrender of rights to our own data.
We seem to have forgotten this lesson, and in the meantime, the power of social media – and its purveyors’ sense of their own importance – has only grown. I shivered last week to learn that Instagram – the king of them all – has decided to start hiding some people’s likes and video views in order remove “the pressure” and “competition”-like feel of the app. Instagram is trialling the feature on people of its choosing, in a handful of countries including Ireland and Italy, whether they like it or not. In my book this is creepy, God-playing behaviour.
We can’t have our social media cake and eat it, so at the end of the day we have a choice. Either we resign ourselves to losing control over our personal data, or we give up our love of selfies. My money’s on the former.