We all use the social media, such as Facebook and Twitter and these have become part of our daily life. I often ask a question from my students who are learning data mining as a subject that why are these platforms free of cost in this world where nothing is free? A number of students do answer that these companies earn through advertisement. However, these students also get stuck when I ask a continuing question that why you do not get annoyed with an advertisement on social media. We get really annoyed watching advertisement on TV and changes the channel during advertisements but hardly leave social media, why? If the advertisements are very few in the social media then how they earn? The answer lies in the term “surveillance capitalism” used by Harvard Business School professor Shoshana Zuboff.
Most of the people are aware of two big jargons in data science, Big Data and Personalized Recommender Systems. The business model of the social media companies, such as Facebook, Twitter, and Google revolves around these two jargons. Using personalized recommender systems, the social media companies target individual advertisement to a user that most probably looking for such kind of a product. Therefore, when we see an advertisement on the social media, we hardly get annoyed. However, to understand the specific and individualized requirements of the users, the social media platforms require a lot and lot of personalized data. To gather the personalized data and in huge amount, the platform is provided free of cost. The users are profiled and compared with different users and are categorized. After categorization of people, the advertisements are targeted to specific people rather than in a random way. This is the good side of recommender systems. However, if we look closely, all surveillance systems are also built on the same model and this is pointed by Shoshana Zuboff.
Ok, now we know social media is a surveillance system but why we are not able to easily leave the social media platforms? The reason is that we are being used as Guinea pigs and a number of psychological and behavior predicting tests are being performed on us by the social media companies. To keep us connected to these social media platforms and to gather more data from us, we are being studied. As a result of tests, social media is engineered to be as habit-forming as cocaine to keep us connected to the platforms. I agree with the Julian Assange that we are the product in the business model of the social media companies.
The social media companies are not restricted to only do surveillance for advertisement. Nothing is stopping them from playing dirty. Most importantly, these platforms are being used for brainwashing people for different agendas. Cambridge Analytica scandal has brought this dirty game into the limelight that these platforms even affects the results of the elections. If anyone of us thinks that it is not possible to brainwash him or her, he or she should look at the smartphone in his/her hand. The business model of the social media platforms requires the constant input of data. Therefore, use cases of smartphones have been devised. We are brainwashed to buy smartphones to constantly provide personalized data to these companies. Even the older mobile phone companies, such as Nokia fails to counter the force of social media companies. We have bought the bugging devices of these companies with our own will. Interesting, isn’t it. Have you ever wondered that why power in the batteries of the smartphones get consumed so quickly even if you are not using them? guess it yourself.
Apart from what we like or dislike, the smart mobile phones have helped the social media companies to know that where we work, where our homes are, what type of jobs we do, to whom we talk, and who our job mates are. For example, if someone wants to find out a number of Army officers of Pakistan in a certain city and their office locations, these companies can provide all the details much better than any insider.
Looking at the power of the online surveillance used by social media companies, many countries are planning to profile their citizens and rate them. These countries will allow or restrict people on access to different things, such as travelling or online purchasing power based on their rating. On the outside, it looks good that governments will be able to track each individual citizen and this will help in curbing the problems, such as terrorism. However, the same power will also help authoritarian governments to control their citizen. They will be able to brainwash their citizen, suppress the freedom of speech, and gain more power.
In the real world, we do mistakes, learn from them and hide those mistakes in the past. However, in the systems where we are (social media and mobile phones) and will be (civilian rating systems by governments) profiled, we will not able to get rid of our past mistakes. The past mistakes will always remain as black spots on our profile. Guess, how you will feel when during a job interview, the interviewer tells you that you were booked by traffic police on one wheeling a bike 20 years ago or you had expressed a negative opinion against someone on your twitter account 10 years ago so you have less rating than the other guy.
Do you like to live like a Guinea pig who is constantly being observed and documented? I don’t.
