Social media is a platform to express our belief, thoughts, and ideas independently. It’s a way to make people listen to our opinions, our views on a topic. Some views are good, some cause riots and some affect the elections. Today, we are living in a digital world and it is necessary for us to be fast because the world has become fast. The Internet has become easy and understandable for many people. It has become easy to know about anything happening around the world in a few seconds.
The internet works on servers and everything that we access is because of the data stored on the servers of big companies. For gaining more and more profit, these companies sell information to third parties. This is a dangerous act. A great example of is the Facebook data leak that affected millions across the world.
Cambridge Analytica robbed its data and Facebook did nothing about it. What should we do, just stop using it? In the current scenario, is it possible?
Every day, millions of message are sent, documents are shared but we never think twice about who can see out our data. Telegram and WhatsApp are very popular applications with end-to-end encryption for security. These applications are good for privacy purposes but very dangerous if they get into the wrong hands like terrorists. Dating app Tinder knows everything about its users – places they visit, people they meet or contacts, even things they search. We click selfies and upload them to social media for likes and comments but hardly think about who can see or use them because we trust social media blindly. We trusted social media too much but they sell our personal data for revenue. These companies make use of our personal data to make attractive ads which seek our attention.
Social media is a world where everyone is connected, but we are being sold every day to businessmen, to political parties.
Recently, after knowing about the Facebook Data leak the only thing we did was start campaigns like #deletefacebook. It’s not a solution. It’s also a point that these campaigns can only spread with the help of social media. Deleting Facebook won’t change things. We need social media because it gives a voice to every common man. Our primary concern should be on how to make social media more secure. We should raise our voice to make the internet a safer place.
Data is a valuable thing. If it gets into the wrong hands there will be a chaos in our world.
We need to learn that data is not a computer code anymore, it is a weapon perhaps far more powerful than nuclear bombs.