Our participation on the internet has increased a lot the last couple of years. Everyone is making use of social networks like Facebook, Instagram, twitter et cetera. Initially these social networks are being used to stay in touch with our friends and family. Letting them know what keeps us busy in our daily lives. Are you going out with your friends? Let’s post that on Facebook! Are you going to travel to an exotic destination? Let’s post the pictures on Instagram! Do you have any doubts or are you irritated by some political decision? No worries, on twitter you can go on blast about anything. You can even hashtag your irritation in the hope it will be a trending topic.
Did you ever question yourself why these social networks are craving for your information? No? Well, here it comes:
Facebook is the pioneer of al social networks. With each click on a like button the corporation collects your entire browsing activities. Using it for a commercial purpose. A small example are the cookies. Believe me, cookies are delicious, but this one has a bitter taste to it. The cookie that Facebook uses is in the form of a text file that can track user activities. Did you for example looked for some Adidas sneakers on Zalando? And not even a minute later you scroll down your feeds on Facebook and what do you see? Indeed, an advertisement of Zalando about Adidas sneakers. For a lot of people it is unnoticed that these activities are caused by the cookies in their browser. Facebook makes effectively use of your information. The biggest revenue income for Facebook is advertisement with a percentage of 76%. The revenue income increased with 45% in regards to the previous year. All due to your online posts.
But not only online post are a way to generate our information to these corporations. Even the supermarket around the corner is trying to influence your buying behaviour. Let’s take Target as an example. This supermarket uses ID cards for each customer. These ID cards are tied with some personal information of the customer such as a creditcard number, address, e-mail address and the name of the customer. Each time the customer buys products the information is being saved so a team of analytics can study the data. The objective of these data analytics is to make predictions about a certain target audience. For instance, pregnant woman. With the data that Target already had they made a prediction that a teenage girl was pregnant. With the information on her ID card they sended baby supplies advertisement to her address on her name. Her father was furious, because he thought that Target was promoting teenpregancy. He went to the store and demanded to talk to the Manager. The manager did not know why the advertisement were send and apologized. After a few days the manager called the father to apologize again. The father said to the manager that his daughter turned out to be pregnant.
Just imagine how far people can go with analysing your information. You choose to put your information out there. Do you think that you should earn something out of the billions of dollars that are being made by these corporations?
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Dear Hajar, thank you for your post. Very interesting question at the end of your blog: do I think I should earn something out of the billions of dollars that are being made by these corporations? The first thing that comes to my mind is that we use services such as Facebook and Instagram for free, and that I myself decided to make use of their platforms and accept cookies. Facebook and Instagram need to earn some type of revenue in order to make their platforms free, and they do so by targeted advertising. If I didn’t like it, the easiest way I think would be to either stop using their platforms, or to stop them from using cookies (thus not allowing to use my cookies).
The example of Target is kind of crazy in my opinion, and it is scary how far this personalized advertising can go. If we don’t want such personalized advertising, maybe we can opt for not using such ID cards (or like the AH bonus card, which knows exactly what I shop and when/where), but then again, my bonus card for example also gives me personalized discounts based on my food preferences.
To get back to your question, maybe in return for using our data, they can ensure our privacy (which is very hard to ensure) and give us personalized offers. I am afraid that by signing up to platforms like this, we are bound to give away our data for free, without getting any money in return.
Hajar, thanks for this interesting post. It is of course clear that companies like Facebook need to generate income to be able to provide you with their free service. This income is generated by companies that are willing to pay social platforms like Facebook, because it helps these companies to generate revenue and profit. There are indeed no free lunches!
It is not visible to individual users how much they have contributed to the profit of the platform. And the platform probably also doesn’t know this per individual user. So it is impossible to determine an amount per user.
To answer your question: I don’t think it’s feasible to demand a financial compensation from the platforms. Being able to use the platforms for free is already a considerable compensation. You should however be aware that everything you do on the internet is logged and stored, so be careful with the information you share on social platforms.
Thanks for your interesting post Hajar. Your post discusses a very controversial topic. While companies are going further and further in analyzing your information, Facebook and Google should not, and are not allowed to – although legislation is hard to enforce – trace data back to a single individual (with his/her personal details). In other words, advertisers can target all pregnant women via Facebook, but do not know the names of the persons that receive the advertisement. Thus, it would be very hard, an possibly even illegal to trace earned money back to an individual. Google and Facebook would, however, be able to trace how much money has been earned by which person, but this would not be ethical and possibly illegal because of the aformentioned reason.
Hi Hajar, thanks for the interesting post, especially with the teen pregnancy example! And to answer you question, whether we should also profit from the revenues that corporations are earning for the use of our information, personally I don’t think we should. One reason is because we should already be aware of their exploitation. For example, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, etc. doesn’t hide the fact that they use cookies for marketing purposes. In fact, many websites today show an icon upon being entered to warn you about their Cookie Policy and what they are used for. Then either you accept or close the window thinking that you stopped them. Of course, there are methods to disable cookies, however blocking them could also prevent some webpages from displaying correctly.
Nevertheless, as Ananda stated, the fact that I chose to use these platforms for free and accepted their cookies, I know (or should know) the “costs” behind it. And again, these free social platforms need a way to also earn revenue somehow. They disrupted the way marketeers can target customers and facilitated the use of tailored ads.
As previously mentioned, if we do deserve anything from all these corporations’ gains is indeed for them to ensure our privacy. It might not seem harmful to give so much information just for some advertisements, but it can become serious if all this information was accessed or hacked by other users as well. The reason so many of us accept the use of cookies or even personalized accounts (e.g. AH Bonus Cards) is due to all the benefits they provide us in return. From discounts to saving time for product(s) search, one could actually say that we do gain something from all their information gathering. Therefore, even though we may still not get directly paid for all their earnings, we do get some indirect advantages. The only challenge is to give and receive all this information in a safe manner.