Senior ball is coming up, and I desparately need a dress, some earrings, and a pair of shoes. I open my computer and hop on some of my favorite websites, including H&M, New York & Co., and Aldo. After scrolling for a while and eventually become frustrated by the amount of money I'll have to spend, I save things to my "save for later" lists, shut my laptop, and pick up my phone to waste the next 10 minutes doing something more productive: scrolling through Facebook.
Hmm, "I wonder what's new today," I thought. "I wonder how Gina's new baby is. Or better yet, what did my mom post for Valentine's Day?" I continue to tap away as I scroll down my screen, and suddenly, I see an advertisement for the exact dress I had just put in my cart on New York & Co.'s website. I immediately exit out of the app due to my annoyance, and get up to go be productive.
This scenario happens daily. I am always shopping online, or looking at jobs on certain websites, and then when I go on my social media apps, those same things I was just looking at or had viewed days ago pops up in an advertisement on my social media page. While I do understand why and how this happens, I am not a big fan of this phenomenon. Something just feels...wrong.
I was wondering how other people felt about this topic, and then I saw the following:
Andreas Mundt, the head of Germany's antitrust regulator, says Facebook can no longer "force its users to agree to the practically unrestricted collection and assigning of non-Facebook data to their Facebook user accounts."
Yay! I'm not the only one who hates this! Facebook, according to this article, thinks this makes their service "better and safer." The big question here is: is the surveillance economy essential to the operation of social media? This has an answer that I really don't know, mostly based on my lack of economical and technological knowledge. I do know one thing, though: I do not want this to happen anymore.
How do we proceed?
That's all for now...
Lynds
No comments:
Post a Comment