Ducks in a Row: Caveat Emptor Social Media
by Miki Saxon
A month ago KG shared an article about how Facebook rummages through your life in pursuit of profit using and algorithm called People You May Know. The results are beyond creepy (emphasis mine).
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A woman whose father left her family when she was six years old—and saw his then-mistress suggested to her as a Facebook friend 40 years later.
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An attorney who wrote: “I deleted Facebook after it recommended as PYMK a man who was defense counsel on one of my cases. We had only communicated through my work email, which is not connected to my Facebook, which convinced me Facebook was scanning my work email.”
Still creepier, but great for profit, are Facebook’s shadow profiles.
… built from the inboxes and smartphones of other Facebook users. Contact information you’ve never given the network gets associated with your account, making it easier for Facebook to more completely map your social connections. (…) Because shadow-profile connections happen inside Facebook’s algorithmic black box, people can’t see how deep the data-mining of their lives truly is, until an uncanny recommendation pops up.
Then there is Android, which collects information even when you tell it not to.
Many people realize that smartphones track their locations. But what if you actively turn off location services, haven’t used any apps, and haven’t even inserted a carrier SIM card?
Even if you take all of those precautions, phones running Android software gather data about your location and send it back to Google when they’re connected to the internet…”
“Don’t be evil” Google also records conversations around their products; that’s not counting the bug in the new Home Mini that secretly recorded everything said near it.
And Amazon’s Echo is no different.
Chamath Palihapitiya, Founder and CEO Social Capital, who worked at Facebook for seven years and became vice president for user growth, is the most recent social media veteran to publicly apologize, “I think we have created tools that are ripping apart the social fabric of how society works.”
Social media addiction is not an accident; it’s intentional, design driven, and it’s sole purpose is to generate revenue.
“The short-term, dopamine-driven feedback loops we’ve created are destroying how society works,” he said, referring to online interactions driven by “hearts, likes, thumbs-up.” “No civil discourse, no cooperation; misinformation, mistruth. And it’s not an American problem — this is not about Russians ads. This is a global problem.”
Palihapitiya’s isn’t the only one feeling guilty.
Palihapitiya’s remarks follow similar statements of contrition from others who helped build Facebook into the powerful corporation it is today. In November, early investor Sean Parker said he has become a “conscientious objector” to social media, and that Facebook and others had succeeded by “exploiting a vulnerability in human psychology.” A former product manager at the company, Antonio Garcia-Martinez, has said Facebook lies about its ability to influence individuals based on the data it collects on them, and wrote a book, Chaos Monkeys, about his work at the firm.
The forces at work behind social media are also money-driven.
In his talk, Palihapitiya criticized not only Facebook, but Silicon Valley’s entire system of venture capital funding. He said that investors pump money into “shitty, useless, idiotic companies,” rather than addressing real problems like climate change and disease. Palihapitiya currently runs his own VC firm, Social Capital, which focuses on funding companies in sectors like healthcare and education.
I doubt any of this is going to change your social media consumption.
But never forget that these companies are not your friend. Their primary purpose is not to make you or anyone else happy.
Their purpose is to make money.
Period.
Anything else that happens is plain old serendipity.
(Watch the entire interview.)
Flickr image credit: Duck Lover
