SABARI GANESH

Delete Facebook! Seriously?

Was Facebook really useful to us all these years? This was the question confronted by everyone who was bit afraid when the scandal of Cambridge Analytica broke out few weeks ago. Facebook’s policies and fundamental ideology to build their empire on the gigabytes of user personal data is not going down well with many of us.

The scandal of Cambridge Analytica where data of 50 million Facebook users was harvested for electoral gains brought forward the massive scale of breach of trust that underwent without the knowledge of users. As a result, #deletefacebook campaign kick started on a substantial scale and several big shots from tech industry aligned with the protest.

Facebook was started as a social media platform where users share their activities and communicate with their ‘friends’. But when did Facebook become a news agency? How can it act like an advertising agency? The fundamental purpose of Facebook was drifted away because of the unprecedented greed for monopoly and money.

Mark Zuckerberg would have never thought a decade ago about Facebook becoming such a massive tool with huge potential of altering the result of an election and also on the other hand has equal potential to ignite a revolution. He built a company but deployed wrong strategies which altered the public perception today.

It took one week for him to come out and speak after the scandal broke out. He was not hiding but was analyzing and investigating and didn’t actually know how to respond. But finally, Mark apologized and kick started remedial measures. However, trust has vanished and people have become aware of the dark side of internet and the utter lack of privacy. Until then, even Sheryl Sandberg, one of the chief architects of Facebook’s path to greatness didn’t Lean into the spotlight but remained in the shadows.  I strongly believe she might have understood the enormous magnitude of disruption and deception they have caused.

Who are responsible for this? Blaming Facebook and Cambridge Analytica will serve nothing. Another company would have done the same. We honestly whispered ‘ I agree’ to Facebook and now are losing our minds after realizing the inner and deeper meaning of ‘I agree’. We knew that our data will be used by Facebook and Google, but never ever dreamt of the bumper harvest we have created for them.

We are completely responsible for our data and we failed to recognize the fact that we are being used as a product by Facebook and not vice versa.  Not every business will provide everything for free. We are provided a service by Facebook to ‘share’ and ‘like’ something in return and we are thus paying them not in dollars but in bits and bytes and megabytes. These bytes are bartered in advertising market for millions of dollars and at the end of the ay we look at Facebook and Google as an inspiration for future entrepreneurship.

Don’t trust Facebook and Google with your data. They may bring in strict policy changes to protect user’s data. Adding to Prashanth’s hypothetical analysis in thREAD ‘If a day comes in future when Mark Zuckerberg or Larry Page run for the office of President of USA, do you believe that they won’t use the data they have with them?’

Should we delete Facebook or should we delete ourselves? Both of them are impossible. But life goes on and we have to move on, shamelessly and carelessly.

Author of above article is much worried about lack of privacy in Facebook, Google and Amazon websites but is really happy to upload pictures in Instagram, gaining perspectives through Quora and highly comfortable and clever enough to have conversations in Whatsapp (Proud owner of 5+ Whatsapp groups by the way).

Image taken from Pixabay under CC0 creative Commons license.