This report almost comes as no surprise to the vast majority of us.
After all, it is pretty common knowledge that whatever you are talking about or maybe even thinking about will somehow manifest itself in ads via social media. Need a new camera? Prepare yourself for an onslaught.
But should we be cool with such a norm? Probably not, particularly when the predictive capabilities of social media are combined with hard data on you as a user.
A report from the FTC indicates that social media companies don’t just eavesdrop on their users, they downright spy on them, collating vast amounts of data with one goal: Sell you more stuff.
What’s the old adage? If something is free then you are the product.
Welcome to a world most of us already know about but perhaps shouldn’t be so complacent with moving forward.
A post about the report quotes US FTC Chair Lina M. Khan who says, “The report lays out how social media and video streaming companies harvest an enormous amount of Americans’ personal data and monetize it to the tune of billions of dollars a year…While lucrative for the companies, these surveillance practices can endanger people’s privacy, threaten their freedoms, and expose them to a host of harms, from identity theft to stalking. Several firms’ failure to adequately protect kids and teens online is especially troubling. The Report’s findings are timely, particularly as state and federal policymakers consider legislation to protect people from abusive data practices.”
How does this concern us? Well, there’s the whole photography and video media being use to train AI topic that is out there. To what extent are these platforms able to see our data in our albums and how do they use it? After all, interpreting photos is nothing when we are at the level of generating them (which is where AI stands now). As we’ve reported multiple times, the avenues for obtaining training data and for obscuring how it is used are so myriad and vast that it underscores what a brave new world AI, social media, and ubiquitous, sophisticated camera technology can bring.
Any thoughts on social media platforms spying on their users are welcome in the comments.
Check out some other photography news at this link.
