Today the brand equity of
Facebook is almost at par with the brands which fulfill our basic necessities of
life. Not having a Facebook account is as good as not having an email id or a
mobile number. This forum is considered to be the only platform whereby you can
be connected with your acquaintances. It hardly matters that you are
active/inactive user, visit Facebook 10 times a day or once in 10 days, know
how it works/not even aware of basic functionalities. All that matters is that
you ought to have a Facebook account which allows you to peep inside someone’s
personal space to the extent someone’s personal life is at display.
From the user perspective, the
domain of Facebook is huge and everyone uses it the way they perceive it to be.
For some it’s the medium to be updated of what their friends and family are
upto, for some it’s the forum to let everyone know what they are upto, for few
it’s meant to share important updates on their journey/work/achievements and
for few it’s for posting for the sake of posting. In all above scenarios one
thing is common which is to let the world know of the things which they might
not have known otherwise.
While users use it in different
ways, the real objective/face of Facebook is way beyond our imagination. Sometime
back everyone used to wonder as to how this is a listed entity with market
capitalization of more than $100 billion and what’s their source of income. The
only source of revenue common public were aware of was the advertisement income.
The users could see small icons of few brands in the right hand corner of the
home page based on the options they selected while creating their profile. A
Layman never bothered to reconcile the revenue which could have earned with
advertisement on the home page and their actual revenue.
We all should be mindful of the
fact that the creator of Facebook is the one who at the age of 19 had 4k
emails, pictures and addresses of everyone connected to Harvard. After gaining
access to this vital information, he called all of them as dumb f***s for
sharing it just like that. You can now imagine the ideology and the principles
which would have laid as a foundation to create Facebook. The only difference
is that now the numbers are magnified from 4k to 2.2 billion. So basically all
your personal information, preferences, the sites you visit, the places you
travel and the personal conversation you make is tracked round the clock without
your knowledge but may be with your permission which is embedded in the
settings and not known to 95% of the users.
Just imagine how is it possible that
you visited any site, say for online shopping, when you were not logged in to
Facebook but when you log in Facebook later on, you see all the products you
scanned on the home page. Magic,
isn’t it? The worse is that Facebook tracks all the internet users even when
they don’t have a Facebook account. Facebook is also alleged to track WhatsApp
conversations and use it for generating advertisement income. So the moral of the story is that if you are
an internet user, you are tracked for everything by someone whom you don’t even
know. Isn’t that scary? Well the reality is that all of this is just a drop in
the ocean. The magnitude of the real issue and some of the allegations on Facebook
is quite grave and can shock you to the core.
After tons of apologies by
Facebook in last decade, The Cambridge Analytica fiasco alone is expected to
affect 87 million users where their personal information is alleged to be
misused for political elections. Steve Bannon who was the campaign manager for
Trump’s 2016 presidential election had served as a board member for Cambridge
Analytica. Cambridge Analytica is said to be a Company which uses data to
change audience behavior. They use data to target voters with hyper specific
appeals which is known as psychographic modelling. Although the networking
baron Zuckerberg says that it was done without his knowledge but so far his
responses have not been convincing at all. Being the CEO of Facebook, he was
unaware of the basic functioning of the entity and preferred to stay mum on
most of the questions which itself indicates the existence of smoke and
mirrors.
Data privacy has been the biggest
threat for ever mushrooming digital world. Automation and digitization are
the buzzwords today but it’s important to keep our eyes opened for the
floodgate of risks this platform is exposed to. We tend to demean those who
don’t embrace technology but we should also factor in their apprehensions which
are not apprehensions anymore. No matter what will be the outcome of countless severe
allegations on Facebook but surely it had invisible faces which were always
existing, busy in minting money and laughing at their users. Next time when you
share your personal information on any digital forum, think twice on your
expectations of data privacy, check countless options under settings and surely
don’t be too possessive about it as there will always be a threat of invisible
faces watching, monitoring and tracking you in every possible way!!!
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