When I landed my job at TikTok, my friends and family congratulated me. A half second later, the jokes started.
“So you're a spy for China? Does it pay well?”
“Guess I better watch what I say around you.”
“Are you wearing a wire?”
I expected the comments to be preludes to political conversations, but the more I heard them, the more I realized that they were really commenting on data security. And honestly, I get it.
I'm a private person. Well, I am now, but it wasn’t all that long ago that I was posting Facebook updates with regularity. Stories that ranged from dorm room antics to reflections on living abroad in South Korea. I don’t regret most of what I posted. Well... I don’t regret about 90% of it. Everyone has a 10% digital footprint they’d prefer didn’t exist. But I digress.
Despite my preference for lurking more than posting, I now find myself working for a company that profits (at least in part) from the data users freely give it. That irony isn’t lost on me. Reading Jessica Reyman’s User Data on the Social Web reminded me how precious (and fragile) digital privacy really is. She writes:
“Although users are aware of the content they are contributing online - when sharing a photo, writing a blog post, updating a status, or entering a 140-character tweet - many are unaware of the additional, hidden contributions of data made with each act of participation.”
That quote hit me. In that context, digital security is essentially an illusion. The smallest interaction - liking a post, clicking on a YouTube video - says something about you. You're building a dossier on yourself, and every action feeds an algorithm, for better or worse. Especially for the worse, and if you need examples, then have a chat with James Gunn, Paula Deen, Doja Cat, PewDiePie, Gina Carano, Roseanne Barr, or Kanye West. The things we say or do online rarely disappear, and through engaging, we lose some level of data security.
The question I ask is that if we, as a society, are too willing to share our information and the platforms we use actively gather said information, then does digital security even exist anymore? Sure, we might be “co-authoring” the internet as Reyman suggests, but do we really have authorship when the things we write don't really belong to us (due in no small part to deliberately obtuse legalese)?
I don’t know.
And I don’t know how to reconcile my company's major function with my own preference for digital solitude. Deep down, I do believe in the potential of social media and the internet in general. It has limitless potential to inform, connect, and build communities. I see the good. I also see the cost. And in many cases, that cost is your data. I suppose I wish that there was a version of the internet where everyone's better angels were in control. Where data was sacred and belonged to people, not companies, and said corporations were transparent and respected our privacy. And above all, everyone felt safe enough to participate in co-authoring something beautiful.
Reyman, J. (2013). User data on the social web: Authorship, agency, and appropriation. In J. Rice & J. Schäfer (Eds.), From a nation divided: Writing cultural politics in the United States (pp. 29–44). Parlor Press.
Well written and reflected on! If you look at data as just the next advance of crowd sourcing, then it may be a bit more tolerable. Kind of like switching to app based ordering system to capture demographics for a restaurant. From a business side of things, data allows for more nimble and accurate evolutions of the business. Really, the only things that has changed in the last 15 years with data collection is the speed and accuracy of the data. What's the difference between a retailor posting a person at the entrance with a clicker and a clip board (which is literally what used to happen) and a retailor retrieving the same types of data via apps and social media?
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