A critique into social media user violations (data privacy, security, and manipulation) and its link to global socio-political implications from a software engineer’s perspective.
Introduction:
In the modern era of human existence, we find ourselves in today, data in all its various forms shapes, and sizes has undoubtedly become one of the most sought-after phenomena known to mankind. As technology has massively grown in leaps and bounds, life has rapidly evolved no less so in the last year or two where the Covid-19 pandemic has increased the dependence on more unconventional technological forms.
As such humanity has had to rely more on online shopping, online meeting boards, online family gatherings, online religious conventions, etc., and life as we’ve known it has drastically changed.
Consequently, with data literally ‘lying around everywhere(approximately 4.14 billion social media users as of Oct 2020) this topic comes as no surprise as more and more often the social-political facets of society are now being directly/indirectly influenced or, if anything, being dictated to by human interactions caught on virtually.
Abstract:
As highlighted in the introduction, the main thrust of this article will focus on trying to highlight the grave and gross misconduct associated with using social media violation and how the software engineering industry can not only learn from this but make an effort to curb this irregularity.
In a world where over 4.4 billion people are on one or the other form of social media, it only makes sense that there would be gross violations as social media is largely where people are spending the bulk of their life be it for online shopping, advertising, social conversations or even following trending political and health topics e.g the US- presidential elections or updates on the COVID-19 pandemic.
By making use of several cases such as the Data Analytica Scandal and its influence in the 2016 US election, The Uganda Internet Media Shutdown in the 2020 election, and Donald Trump’s Twitter account suspension, this write-up will seek to expose the gross human social media privacy violations which are being perpetrated in the name of national security or safety interests.
Once that has been gathered, studied, and analyzed, the next move would then be to formulate and implement ways by which to safeguard user privacy be it on a subsistent user-level scale or commercial large firm/ government scale so as to ensure both stakeholders are happy but most importantly trust each other!
This could include improving awareness on consent authorization, making data capturing more anonymous, improving data capturing security, bringing in legislation to curb or limit uncontrolled autonomy by large tech giants, introducing social media application features that concretize the need to be more responsible with oneself’s data, privacy and securing of sensitive/personal information.
Eventually, the idea is to help not only in the topical discussion of improving data security and privacy but also in the actual implementation and putting in place tangible mechanisms be it in political, social, or technical/programming industries.
What is data privacy?
In order to get a clear picture of the hype and importance of this topic, it is vital to kick off by defining the term Data Privacy.
Shiv (2020) defines Data Privacy as, “how a piece of information — or data — should be handled based on its relative importance.” While in an article by SNIA, data privacy is coined as, “An area of data protection that concerns the proper handling of sensitive data including, notably, personal data but also other confidential data, such as certain financial data and intellectual property data.
As such from the above excerpts, for the purpose of this write-up, Data privacy will be considered as the ability or privilege of a user to keep in secret or conceal any of their digital content, information that they deem personal and confidential. Some key pieces of such information may include one’s Social Security number, bank records, Medical records, Electronic mail credentials, pins passwords, etc.
Why is Data Privacy important?
In a world fast-evolving and transitioning towards a heavy online presence, there is an unquestionable need to safeguard one’s sense of privacy, autonomy, and independence in our online interactions. This phenomenon is one that, though fairly new, has become an essential part of improving the safety and harmony of the user’s social media and otherwise experience online.
Data privacy has for long been thought to be of importance when it comes to matters of National Interest e.g. (Snowden WikiLeaks whistleblowing and Chelsea Manning CIA whistleblowing), however even in recent times the way people’s data has been harvested without their knowledge and without specifics reasons has fueled the call for this has heightened the need for security against the invasion of privacy by various stakeholders such as Civic Society groups, Political parties, and at times even governments.
It is pivotal to understand that data privacy is not only a necessity but a basic fundamental right especially in the global village we live in today. (Shiv, 2020) Echoing the sentiments of the previous statement, it is imperative to mention that with data lying around virtually anywhere and everywhere, there is a need to ensure that this data is protected, safeguarded, and appropriately used so as to avoid various miscellaneous acts such as identity theft, fraud, cyberbullying and in certain worst cases human psychographic manipulation.
Hence, data privacy will not allow users to feel safe, but it will increase and improve the inter-dependability within all stakeholders involved in the data handling i.e. social media users and tech giants, governments, or online retailers such as amazon, uber, aliexpress, etc. Consequently, this will allow people to voice their opinion freely without any fear of manipulation, victimization nor at worst endangering their life or that of their loved ones.
Data Privacy Violations:
Some of the biggest scandals of our time:
- Data Analytica-Facebook Scandal:
This scandal was one of, if not the biggest data heists to ever break out in the 21st century thus far. Confessore (2018) mentions that ‘With over 87 million users’ data profiles being ambushed for psychographic vote swinging purposes in the US-2016 election, this drastically shows the weight online user data is playing in this modern era in literally every aspect of our daily lives.’
Breaking down what really happened, basically, Cambridge Analytica’s role was to provide harvested data from Facebook for the Trump campaign in order to psychologically manipulate users based on their likes, beliefs, preferences, etc, to vote for Donald Trump.
What is even more heinous, is the fact that this ‘data heist’ scheme was carried out completely without the knowledge and consent of those involved. Primarily this highlights the ever-growing need for data protection, privacy, and security to be more radicalized and acknowledged if the new global tech phenomenon is to be pursued in a safe and user-friendly environment.
2. Donald Trump account suspension on Twitter:
This definitely was one of the highly controversial cases that again threw into the fray the discussion surrounding the power and autonomy that large tech giants hold. Moreso, the fact that this form of freedom of expression was being curtailed not only in America dubbed ‘the land of the free and the great’, but to the one holding the highest office in the land was just shocking, to say the least.
In a statement issued by Twitter (2021) on the matter, they mentioned the following:
“After close review of recent Tweets from the @realDonaldTrump account and the context around them — specifically how they are being received and interpreted on and off Twitter — we have permanently suspended the account due to the risk of further incitement of violence.”
Although we cannot argue with the fact that the comments in question tweeted by Trump did fuel a certain reaction from his supporters, the question still remains as to whether by signing ourselves to accounts with Tech giants such as Google, Facebook, Instagram and Twitter are users not in any way selling their data, together with the sense of independence, authority, consent, and autonomy to these firms particularly more so if our opinions seem to differ to that of the majority?
Consequently, it definitely raises the question regarding how much freedom one is allowed to ‘express’ and to what extent one’s opinions are deemed either violent, derogatory, or inappropriate particularly if they don’t seem to meet a certain status quo.
The solution!
Here we look at some of the steps being implemented to deal with the problem:
- User Consent.
Broughton (2020) argues that ‘If anything most users would be more than willing to share their information if consulted and extensively made aware of what their data is being used for.’ The simplest yet the most effective way to start addressing this elephant in the room would be to openly and transparently inform the users regarding what they’re signing up for and also asking for permission prior to manipulating or exploiting their data in any way.
One such case in point, Google recently advised that it was terminating harvesting of IDFAs for its iOS apps which were currently being used for advertisement reasons. This comes in the wake of Apple’s new regulatory policies on improving user data protection. Resultantly, there won’t be any Apple tracking prompt shown above in any of Google’s iOS applications.
2. Apps that are more user secure signal, telegram, etc:
With over 4.4 billion users active on social media in one form or the other in the world today, it is quite evident that social media has become an integral part of human life and is here to stay! However given these statistics, there is a need to ensure more secure, safer, and reliable applications are developed and rolled out which would help to regain user trust in the use of social media from a data handling dimension.
‘More users than ever before rely on mobile applications for a majority of their digital tasks over traditional desktop applications. In 2015 in the U.S. alone, users spent 54% of their digital media time on mobile devices actively using mobile apps.’ (Chu, 2021) Building on the previous statement, it is key to highlight the weight of the statistics backing the growth and dependability of users on social media.
That being the case, there definitely needs to be a conscious decision of improving and building apps that are high on security, anonymity, as well as user data sensitivity as these applications, have unrestricted permission to large volumes of user data, much of which is sensitive data and must be protected from unauthorized access. Some applications which have made strides towards improving this include Signal, Telegram, Mozilla Firefox, LinkedIn just to mention a few.
Conclusion:
In summary, although it would be virtually impossible to exhaust all the challenges and related proposed solutions to tackle the difficulties faced in the world of data handling on social media, hopefully, some of the aspects discussed above help to give perspective into how the above-given cited topic could be explored.
References.
Confessore, N. (July 2018). “Cambridge Analytica and Facebook: The Scandal and the Fallout So Far”,. New York Times, accessed from https://www.nytimes.com/2018/04/04/us/politics/cambridge-analytica-scandal-fallout.html on 09/04/21
SNIA, “What is Data Privacy?” accessed from https://www.snia.org/education/what-is-data-privacy on 11/04/21.
Twitter Inc. (January 2021). “Permanent suspension of @realDonaldTrump.” Twitter Inc, accessed from https://blog.twitter.com/en_us/topics/company/2020/suspension.html on 11/04/21.
Broughton, M. (Jan 2020) “Data Privacy Day 2020: How the Ad Tech Industry is Leading a New Era.” ExchangeWire accessed from https://www.exchangewire.com/blog/2020/01/28/data-privacy-day-2020-how-the-ad-tech-industry-is-leading-a-new-era/ on 13/04/21
Chu, M. “11 Safest Social Networks Ranked & Reasoned.” DataOverhaulers., accessed from https://dataoverhaulers.com/safest-social-networks/ on 08/04/21
Shiv, A. (Sep 2020), “What is data protection, and why is it important?” Financial Times. Accessed from https://www.financialexpress.com/industry/technology/what-is-data-protection-and-why-is-it-important/2076419/ on 9/04/21
