Member-only story
Overthinking Data Privacy on Social Media
Everyone complains they steal our data. Is it a big deal?
Whenever a giant tech company acquires another popular platform — or a particular platform updates its privacy policy, people start finding alternatives. Most of the people chose those alternatives based on the current trend rather than analyzing them in-depth. The recent activity regarding WhatsApp’s privacy policy amendment is very popular these days. Many people share a lot of posts about alternatives for WhatsApp: Telegram and Signal. Are you worried about these privacy-related myths than appreciating the quality of the existing popular apps?
Why they need your data?
Data is indeed fuel for modern machine learning algorithms. Machine learning algorithms on these social media platforms are doing two tasks: displaying advertisements based on the user’s behavior and saving the user’s time by automatically doing what the user expects to do. They can enhance the quality of these two tasks when they collect more data. Also, when the quality of these two tasks is improved, they can make more money.
Nobody likes paid social media platforms. Therefore, they need a way to be profitable as a company.
