Instagram: Photo Platform or Advertising Center?
We’ve probably all been there. Last night, you were talking to your friend about wanting to purchase a new water bottle. Today, as you scroll through your Instagram feed, ads start popping up for — you guessed it — water bottles. You might not think much of it at first, but as phenomenons like this happen again and again, you start to notice a pattern where products or services you find yourself casually thinking about start to show up in ads on social media.
In his article “Critical Questions for Big Data”, Boyd talks about how big data changes knowledge as we know it, and how it can be unethical to use this data even if it’s extremely accessible. It might not seem too scary that certain apps like Instagram or Facebook use your data to provide you more tailored advertisements. However, Boyd makes the point that “features like personalization allow rapid access to more relevant information, but they present difficult ethical questions and fragment the public in troubling ways”. It’s difficult to constantly keep in mind the fact that these companies collect exorbitantly large amounts of data about us, since they likely only use the data that helps them profit more off of us. But what about the data they’re not using? Beyond privacy issues, there are still many concerns to be had. How and what exactly is it collected? It’s quite troubling when you consider that every minute detail, from how many seconds you spend looking at a specific post to the way you move your mouse or scroll around, and everything we do and don’t do is recorded and added to a huge collection of data about us.
Because many people spend the majority of their time on social media apps, they likely have the most data about us. Furthermore, it is worrying how most of the ads and news we consume these days are from social media, rather than more legitimate sources. Along with their exhaustive data on users, these companies can then feed us whatever information they want to and still avoid being held accountable because we don’t know what they’re collecting, and because we generally voluntarily use their for-profit platforms. Ultimately, the best solution is to regulate these companies with more laws to protect us. One such example is the California Consumer Privacy Act, which forces businesses to be more transparent by giving consumers the right to know what exactly is being collected, delete their data, or opt out of the sale of their data. However, realistically, I think it will take a long time before regulation laws can catch up to the latest technology, and it’s very important for individuals to be more aware of these issues so that we can gradually push for large-scale change together.
