"Everything you do is being tracked!"
"If you are not paying for the product, then you are the product."
Two documentaries debut on Netflix, "Social Dilemma" and "The Great Hack". Having worked in the same industry for many years, the internal workings of social media apps were well known but this highlighted it even more.
"How are companies like Google, Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, which basically give everything for free, so rich?" I always ask this question in my sessions. As a non-technical person, I get a lot of answers from the front end audience like, "The internet company is paying them for usage or they are selling your data". Some people even say that they are "making money on ads" but it is not clear how. This is exactly what is covered in both these documentaries.
"They are not interested in you, they are interested in your interest". When the US election was held, Cambridge Analytica, a data analysis and campaigning company, worked for Donald Trump. Taking advantage of the fact that Facebook gives access to third-party apps, this company developed an app in which a user's personality test survey was taken. For this, the user would also get money up to 5 dollars. There was only one condition that users had to "Login with Facebook". In this, Cambridge Analytica was getting access to the user's profile. By this method they got the data of Facebook profile of almost 270 thousand people. Along with that, with the access to the profiles of these people's friends, that number reached almost 87 million American citizens. They got at least 5000 data points of a person and through data analysis they studied the profile of each person. From that, the personality of each person was predicted. All this happened automatically through artificial intelligence. The system gets to know the person more than the person knows himself. Some negative content was created about Trump's opponents and the content was shown to the American citizens according to their mood. Artificial intelligence works very smartly in this too. After this, an American journalist, Carol Cadwalladr, brought the matter into focus and contacted Christopher Wylie, who worked as a data scientist at Cambridge Analytica, in the study. Because of this, everything came to light. After all, the matter went on for a long time and "Can the next elections be conducted in an honest manner?" Such a question was raised. When Mark Zuckerberg (father of Facebook) was asked about this in the legislative branch (called Congress in America), he could not answer many things.
Swati Chaturvedi's book "I Am A Troll" about the 2014 elections also sheds some light on this matter. The social media apps you are currently using (maybe other free apps too) are tracking everything you do. Basically what you say (in any language) is also tracked nowadays and there are many examples of this. Although your data is not sold directly to any company, this app keep complete study of your personality. These companies have precise information about your every personal and professional life. And information is shown to you based on this data. If this is to be stopped then a phone with a simple key pad will be required which is difficult for many people at the moment. So don't assume that everything you see or are shown is true. Because we feel what is shown to us is true.
That's it for now!
Thanks,
Subodh Anant Mestri
