It’s a digital age conundrum — to click or not to click. This is backed by the human urge to often act against our own interest by compromising online privacy. We need to feel secure, want instant gratification and the most alarming — overlook innocuous default settings on apps, sites, making everyone happy to share away. On Facebook, Instagram, social media and a slew of apps, you could be king or queen by virtue of your clicks! Ruling over minions with surveys on knowledge, beauty, intellect and word power, you’ve lasciviously logged on and opened a Pandora’s box. They have made you Einstein, Elizabeth Taylor, or even Beyonce for the day, depending on your proclivity to online surveys. Yet, have they, really? With privacy settings not really private, and data manipulation given once you enter into the quagmire of Internet, those inane IQ tests, beauty surveys, glam surveys, etc. are all means to entrap the clueless user. Even calls one makes, their duration and to whom are recorded if the FB app is downloaded.
Or as WhatsApp wisdom purports, “If you’re not paying for it, you’re not the customer. You’re the product being sold.” Inadvertently, you are being used for a larger sinister goal. And you don’t even know it.
Take for instance, engineer Prachi Sinha, 32, who clicks on any survey she finds, adds details of where she checked into, what she likes, even who she calls, and so on. She then proceeds to share it. Minutes later, her friends are bombarded by invitations. Shekhar Vijayan, a social media expert, explains the tight rope we are walking, “Data manipulation has been going on for ages and this issue has come to light because it’s Facebook. The spate of accusations over Cambridge Analytica is gaining traction in the US because of the results it has manipulated towards the US elections and it’s just the tip of the iceberg as more skeletons are expected to fall out of the closet. Off late, other social media platforms have been getting more people on their platform and Facebook is well aware. People need to realise that what we put online is going to be on the servers, and can be hacked. Social media platforms which include the likes of Facebook, LinkedIn, Instagram should have more stringent controls in terms of privacy as this issue can snowball into an avalanche in no time.
Co-founder WhatsApp Brian Acton might have other reasons to join in the delete bandwagon as he knows Facebook’s shares go down if people boycott it, and WhatsApp user count goes up, which means more money... it’s cut throat business at the end of the day. This #deletefacebook and #boycottfacebook movement is the digital candle-light march movement and means nothing if larger issues are not resolved.”
Instant gratification is also a reason why people love to be interactive on social media. “By far the most influential study on instant gratification has been done at Stanford University by Dr. Walter Mischel. It proved that people are hungry for instant gratification. In the experiment, children were given one marshmellow and told if they wait for 10 minutes without eating it, they will get two more. Most children could not wait and ate up the one they had in hand. The few children who resisted the urge of instant gratification were tacked 20 years later and they were much more successful in money, career, relationships and stability in personality. Social media like FB has opened a Pandora of instant gratification, satisfying false egos through non-standardised IQ tests, beauty trends etc. People who succumb to these false tests feed this urge and end up losing, in terms of personal and private data,” Dr Akshay Kumar, a psychologist explains.
According to a report in the Atlantic, when one accesses an app on Facebook, be it a personality-quiz, a game, a horoscope, or a sports community, it presents you with an authorisation dialogue, where the specific data an app says it needs is displayed for user consideration. That could be anything — your name, friends list, email addresses, photos, direct messages and etc. And therein lies the danger.
CT Shankar, co-founder, Digital Marketing School says, “The first thing we have to do is to accept the reality, that if you are digitally connected, your data is not secure anymore. People think Facebook and Google are social media networks and search engines respectively, but they’re actually data companies which sell personal data. Data privacy needs to be abided but the truth is nobody does it, and that’s how it is. Even a company like Apple has had a thefts before. Either a company can give it out intentionally or it can be hacked into. There’s a website called Trendhunter, which analyses data and catches the trend that is just in it’s very nascent stages. They will sell this information before it actually becomes a trend, so that companies can make products accordingly. There are a lot of people who try very hard to keep their privacy, but whatever tricks they may use, they will be able to secure only a maximum of 30 per cent of their data.”
This is just a needle in the haystack of data manipulation, Founder & MD, Raintree Media, Sandhya Mendonca elaborates, “What is privacy? In this digital era, nobody can hide even under a rock. The worst fears of Orwell have come true and more. It’s not only Big Brother but just about anybody who wants to peek into your heart, brain, moods, relationships, apart from contact and bank details.” So how does one play it safe? “Most of us are not very clued into safety aspects. Even if we learn belatedly, can we keep up with the companies who mine info? Their teams of digital natives will always be several miles ahead of us. Unless we are prepared to go back to a life less connected, we will have to live with this,” is a harsh reality, but everyone is busy clicking, and people lurk behind servers to exploit away.
Solutions to safeguard
- Enhance your cyberliteracy
- Encrypt data.
- Always make sure you use secure passwords to access social networks.
- Be careful about putting too much information into your status updates — even if you trust the people in your networks. It is easy for someone to copy.
- Be careful when accessing your social network account in public Internet spaces. Delete your password and browsing history when using a browser on a available network.
— Dr Manoj Kumar Sharma, Professor of Clinical Psychology, SHUT clinic (Service for Healthy use of Technology) NIMHANS
Tech expert weighs in
The thing is that you do have to give permissions to apps and quizzes when you connect to them. But what a lot of people didn’t realise before Cambridge Analytica is that you were also putting your friends’ information at risk. For example, even a simple app like Tinder, which requires your Facebook login details without fail, will be able to see information from your friends as well.
Quizzes on Facebook started many years ago, and not a lot of people paid attention to the permissions they were giving away. So not only could they see your name, where you worked, and your relationship status, but your friends’ names, their birthdays and maybe even more.
One good thing about this situation is that you can go to your settings and see the apps and quizzes you’ve allowed access to your data, and what they can read. You can always revoke access to it now. However, the data that’s gone is gone. A report today has suggested that Facebook gave away data about 57 billion friendships. Anyone could build a connection and graph according to this information.
Mark Zuckerberg as a measure has now announced that Facebook will revoke access to apps if they haven’t been used for three months, but that’s kind of like bolting the door after the horse has escaped.
— Ivan Mehta
— With inputs from Pooja Prabbhan, Kavi Bhandari, Nikhita Gowra and Ruth Prarthana
