I am studying abroad in London, which is a city with a ton of free museums that are must-see. I wandered into the Science Museum the other day and left with a very different opinion about how to use Facebook.
Let me preface this with saying that I don’t excessively post on Facebook and I seldom scroll through my feed. I do, however, use the messenger app almost every day. It’s the easiest way to communicate with people back home and students here who don’t have a data plan. Facebook messenger is essentially just texting, but it happens to have the information go through Facebook, the most invading social media platform.
Facebook has a history of treating its users like guinea pigs for their analytics department. I knew of this vague idea prior to going to the museum, but only to an extent. In high school, our teachers advised us to not post our political opinions in efforts to be marketable when we search for jobs in the future. According to Social Times, 92 percent of recruiters use social media to learn more about the applicants of the job and determine who is best for the job. The more information you put up, then, the more information they have that could potentially hurt your chances of getting that job. Although interesting, this wasn’t huge news to me. It makes sense that recruiters want information about their applicants and why wouldn’t they use our Facebook pages, a stream of our opinions that we put out for the world to see.
The news to me was that Facebook is also using the pages you like, the groups you join and the content you share to personalize the advertisements you see in a pretty creepy and uncalled for way. According to the London Science Museum, Facebook uses the information on your timeline and the actions you do on their website as a way to tell about your personality. And it isn’t just “Oh, she likes Nike therefore she likes sports. We will advertise for a sporty girl.” They take the information holistically to determine whether you are shy or outgoing, organized or messy and so on. Once that is determined, your advertisements are tailored for you.
Facebook calls this way of advertising “efficient.” I say it is pretty invasive. Facebook has made it nearly impossible to have a private account, which is hard for people who are simply trying to connect with friends they actually know. According to Forbes, Facebook has gone as far as asking new users to provide a government ID in order to verify their name. Even for a user like me, who wants a reasonable amount of privacy, it can be hard because clicking a like button or sharing an article on Facebook messenger to a friend, isn’t just an action. It’s more data for Facebook to analyze in order to sell more ads and make more money.
It’s evident that Facebook relies on the money from advertising considering its latest scandal. They overestimated the time that users spend watching videos by 60 to 80 percent in the last two years, leaving companies that invested in video advertisements angry with the miscalculation. Big advertisement companies like Publicis reportedly spent $7 billion dollars on Facebook video advertising, and that’s just one company. Facebook is a hub for social media advertising, and it’s making the company loads of money. According to CNN, advertising makes up 80 percent of the company’s profit.
Considering the money Facebook brings in, the company can afford to play with the line between tailoring information for the user and invading the user’s privacy. And the company is no stranger in toying with users’ privacy. In 2012, the company was exposed for playing with the feelings of its users and then analyzing the results. Basically, the company skewed the words, some being more positive and others more negative, that were seen on almost 700,000 user timelines to see what effect it would have on the user’s habit. Since then, Facebook has apologized and taken users’ request for privacy a little more seriously, but the issue still remains: If Facebook had the capability to do this in the past, could it still be skewing what we see now? Although the scandal in 2012 was a more drastic measure of manipulating its users, Facebook’s way of advertising is using the same idea of changing the newsfeed of a user for their gain.
Its way of advertising, although legal, is overbearing and an invasion of privacy, especially for those of us who don’t fully understand how our information is being used. As a Facebook user, which many of us are, we shouldn’t be overly confident that our information isn’t being seen by others, even when in a “private” group on their messenger app. It’s very likely that the link to a funny post you are sending to your closest friends may be used to develop your next sidebar of advertisements.
