In September 2006, users of Facebook awoke to the software update which would forever change the way we interact with the internet: the News Feed. This is precisely the software that is incorporated into every media platform we use today, where new activity from users is exhibited chronologically on our home page. It may not seem so extraordinary to our generation, but prior to the update, there was hardly anything ‘social’ about social networking.
In fact, the only way you could find out what had occurred in your friends’ lives was to check all their pages individually and hope that you didn’t forget about anyone or fail to notice anything. The News Feed changed all that; this was a feature that potentially provided users with an audience of thousands. Now, any slight change on someone’s profile was to be broadcasted, thousands of bios, relationship statuses or profile pictures were endlessly trickling through this live feed with any miniscule alteration.
From that point onward, nothing you did on Facebook was private anymore and though to us, this might seem like the very point of social media, it wasn’t exactly welcomed at the time. It’s predicted that roughly half a million users protested over the new system, some even marching outside the Facebook HQ in Palo Alto. People truly believed that this feature was a violation of privacy, some deeming it “spooky and stalker-esque”.
Back then, some users were angry about the news feed, which we take for granted as an integral part of any social media platform. ‘Privacy’ in this digital domain encompassed far more in 2006 than it does today. This is most apparent today through the way data mining for advertising has become commonplace and largely ignored by social media users. Suddenly, the shampoo you mentioned you needed to buy, in the room where you keep your Alexa, is mysteriously plastered on the sides of your YouTube page – have you ever wondered why? At every moment when you use your phone, laptop or any other intelligent device, data about your habits are relentlessly monitored in the background.
Your social media is not the only place where your data is collected and stored. Online banking, hailed as a revolution of convenience, can be seen in a more sinister light when one remembers that your banking history could potentially reveal everything about you. If that appears harmless, let me give you an example. Account Holder X spends £32.50 at the local wine store every Saturday morning, which he gets to by tapping his card on the Underground. On the way home, about once a month, he stops by the pharmacy and pays £10 for a prescription of Ursodiol. Sometimes he spends £13.20 on cigarettes at a local convenience store. Through these purchases alone, we can deduce: the area that Account Holder X lives in or frequents, some details of his medical information (Ursodiol is a treatment for liver disease) and a bad habit that he has – frequent and copious consumption of alcohol and smoking. At best, being able to discern this much from a few lines of data is a bit unsettling. At worst, this information could one day be extracted to exploit his insurance, employment, and more.
When discussing these issues with friends and family, the consensus is almost always, “Why should it bother me?” or, “It doesn’t affect me.” Actually, many of us find tailored ads helpful, and online banking convenient. Most people I had this discussion with were surprisingly very aware of online surveillance, yet in the trade-off between convenience and privacy, convenience always won. For the most part, it won’t affect people right now.
Yet, in studying this trajectory of internet privacy, one may look to the future with some horror or fear; if companies continue to transgress into private data and we wittingly continue to support them, the idea of ‘privacy’ may be totally unrecognisable in another 15 years.
