…and you’ve read and accepted its terms of use
Does privacy still exist in the Internet era? Not really. As the web was spreading around, giving opportunities for everyone to share about their passions and opinions, allowing to stay in touch or meet with people around the world, the virtual public spaces where we were growing as young people from the XXIth century evolved as well, and we forgot one really important detail: social media, where we meet, share and text, aren’t public at all. On the contrary, the web has been shaped according to our real world, with great companies, aiming for profit and crushing every competition and setting a big oligopoly where everything is private. Therefore, Big Brother from Orwell’s novel 1984 starts increasingly looking like Meta, Google or Tencent… Why is it still free, then? Because you are the product.
Indeed, every single piece of information you use on the web is recorded and sold to third companies that rank you according to your profile, in order to know about your preferences and target you better. Cookies, trackers set to gather information about you, are dispatched in every app or website that you use: therefore, even without being on social media, any use of the internet will leave some marks in big companies’ servers. And you agreed for this: as boring and long as it is, reading the EULA (end-user license agreement) and, most importantly, signing them makes you willingly give everything that they can take. But how much data can they get from you? Here is a small and non-exhaustive list.
– Everything you write when you register in: name, gender, age, address, pictures of you and your friends, phone and email address used for login…
– Every interaction that you have on social media. There are different policies according to the company, but keep in mind that your comment, messages, everything that you like or dislike, that you spend more time on or that you skip, as well as your posts, photos or videos on your profile or in your conversations.
– Everything on the device you’re using. Location – by tracking the IP if not by direct consent – but also version of navigator, brand of the device, duration of loading the pages or processing information (quality of internet connection and device’s processor), level of battery, screen size and definition, time zone…
– Fingerprint and facial recognition. A few media investigations point out that even if you aren’t using the camera nor the app, iOS, Google or Meta can get access to the microphone and camera if you allow it on your phone, which means that every step and word that you do or say is recorded. Facebook denied it multiple times; and this is illegal in most countries, but keep in mind that they can change EULA whenever they want and that they actually have the technology to do it anyway. On another hand, they register your fingerprint and connection information.
– Your schedule. Every time you connect and disconnect, the different places you go and use those media allows some apps to draw a really detailed plan of your life. For example, you check your Instagram feed at the morning, send some messages on Whatsapp at noon and call someone on Messenger to set a meeting after work or university, then play some game by waiting in a bar and publish some picture of you, Meta will remember who you were talking to, all the places you had been, the hours you were unable to answer (when and where you live, sleep, eat and work), which bar is your favourite, probably even the drink that you ordered if it appears on the picture. At the end of the day, the company will remember basically everything, even better than you do, whether they have access to your camera or not.
Mainstream social media companies, as well as navigators such as Google or Microsoft Edge, are the core of these big data foraging. They are actually providing services to the majority of the world population: 59,4% of it is using social media in 2023, this proportion varies from one continent to another: 83,5% in Western and Northern Europe, while there is only African and Central/Southern Asia that have rates under 50% (less than 10% for Central and eastern Africa). Between these big data companies, the highest number of users is on Facebook and Google. Here is a review of the main social media data gathering policy in 2023, according to Terms of Service Didn’t Read.
| Service | Amout of users (in billions) | Holder | Type | Rank (According ToSDR) |
| Google Chrome | 3.2 | Alphabet | Search Engine | E |
| 3 | Meta | Social Network | E | |
| Youtube | 2,6 | Alphabet | Social Network | E |
| 2 | Meta | Instant Messaging App | D | |
| 1,2 | Meta | Social Network | E | |
| 1,2 | Tencent | Instant Messaging App | ? (but probably E) | |
| TikTok | 1 | ByteDance | Social Network | E |
| Messenger | 1 | Meta | Instant Messaging App | E |
| Snapchat | 0,569 | Snap Inc. | Social Network | E |
| Discord | 0,563 | Benchmark (as shareholder)Tencent (as shareholder) | Instant Messaging and Social Network | E |
| X (ex-Twitter) | 0,433 | X Corp. | Social Network | E |
| 0,430 | Advance Publication (as shareholder)Tencent (as shareholder) | Social Network | E | |
| Signal | 0,04 | Signal Foundation | Instant Messaging | B |
| DuckDuckGo | 0,1 | Duck Duck Go, Inc | Search Engine | A |
As you can see, except marginal applications, Big (Data) Brother is everywhere. But is it that bad to be spied on? That answer belongs to you, but the promises of these companies not to sell any information to state organizations shouldn’t be trusted. Tencent belongs to the Chinese Communist Party, and the US police have been using AI software such as ShadowDragon to set up profiles, and we won’t start a list of scandals that have been exposed where a government is spying on its citizens. And I personally don’t want any company spying on my every move and thoughts.
What can you do about it? First and foremost, be aware that nothing is really private on the Internet, except the company that is providing you the service in exchange of your personal data. Terms of Service Didn’t Read is giving you summaries of EULA for every service that you use. Then, there are alternatives, more respectful about the use of personal data. Duckduckgo or Startpage as web engine, Diaspora or Mastodon as social media, Signal or Telegram as texting apps. And of course, a VPN is the key for your privacy: it prevents you from being located and tracked, and doesn’t leave any marks after you disconnect. Also, you can set your phone off and leave it at home sometimes: human kind managed to survive without it for some millions years.
Youen Le Bris
Sources:
Right.ly: the privacy policies of social media companies : https://right.ly/our-views-and-opinions/the-privacy-policies-of-social-media-companies-how-do-they-use-your-data/
Newsweek.com: 15 ways we give social media companies personal data : https://www.newsweek.com/15-ways-we-give-social-media-companies-personal-data-1580508
Terms of Service: Didn’t Read Website : https://tosdr.org/en/frontpage
Michael Kwet: ShadowDragon: Inside the Social Media Surveillance Software That Can Watch Your Every Move
Statista.com
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