The Surveillance Society And Social Media's Collection of Personal Information
What Are The Potential Long-Term Consequences of Social Media's Collection of Personal Information on Our Lives and Society as a Whole?
by framersqool:
READ: A New Federal Bill Could Require You To Show Facebook and Twitter Your Government ID - The age verification proposal is a disaster for both children and adults.
H.R. 821, which Stuart introduced in the House Committee on Energy and Commerce, requires platforms to verify age using government identification, such as a birth certificate or a driver's license. The bill would apply to any platform that allows users to make accounts for posting, sharing, or viewing user-generated content (UGC). In addition, to be covered, a platform's primary purpose must be the dissemination of UGC.
This spacious definition of "social media" could be interpreted by regulators to include messaging, video, and email services, none of which are explicitly excluded from the statute's provisions. And unlike many recent proposals to regulate online life, the bill does not establish a market cap threshold to spare smaller platforms from having to collect sensitive information from users—which would be costly to protect and would threaten users' privacy in the event of a data leak.
I am appalled by and have always objected to the social media phenomenon since its emergence several years ago. I object to it in its entirety on so many levels that it is hard to narrow down my unease about this scourge that has overtaken the entire human experience in such short order and to such a thorough extent.
I have observed the apparent dangers for many years now; the potential for addiction, the extreme compromise to the norms of attentiveness and interpersonal (real) communication, the utterly unconscionable elevation of sinister creatures such as Zuckerberg, Sandberg, Musk, and so many others to a newly created rank of 'tech moguls' for no good reason and the effect of transforming a routine disease outbreak into a global behavioral pandemic of catastrophic and entirely needless proportions - not to mention the capability for harassment, slander, defamation, and weaponized gossip, whose effects I have witnessed personally again and again.
These gimmicks are not, and never have been, intended as any 'service' to the user. It is so fully axiomatic that ' you are the product, not the client' regarding these monstrosities that one of the most disturbing things is that everyone knows this and doesn't mind.
Along with the business model of treating intensely personal information about billions of everyday addicts as a commodities market in itself comes the inevitable effect of causing these things to be a vast source of data not just for the purposes of marketing, enough of an evil in itself, but for official surveillance on a hitherto-unimaginable scale.
These colossal amounts of data about every detail of people's lives will be used by regimes as crowd-control equipment has been, and will be, on an increasing scale from here forward.
Of course. Why have I been one of the only people on earth to point out how dangerous these.... things are and have been since their conception? Why can't anyone seem to get through a goddamn day without them?
Has this much power ever been handed over, and not even by coercive means, to forces and factions which clearly cannot be trusted with it, ever?
How has this even happened?
What will have to happen to make it stop?
framersqool
framersqool is an aging bachelor of no particular consequence. He is in command of more opinions than facts (but occasionally the facts, or the lack thereof) and can make a thing seem worth writing about.