In the modern age, technology and social media has quickly become enmeshed within our culture, leaving many to wonder what exactly this means for personal privacy and social media trails.
“From the very beginning of software, it has always, always, always been the case that lawyers write these things,” said Don Winiecki, a professor at Boise State. “And what they say is, ‘we’re going to do what we’re going to do’. And if you use this software, that means that you are agreeing to allow us to do whatever it is we do.”
Popular social media websites such as TikTok and Instagram reveal what exactly it is they do with your information in the commonly neglected privacy policies.
TikTok privacy policy states; “Advertisers, measurement and other partners share information with us about you and the actions you have taken outside of the Platform, such as your activities on other websites and apps or in stores, including the products or services you purchased, online or in person.”
If any service is free to use, it is extremely likely that you are the product being sold.
According to Winiecki, Platforms such as YouTube, Instagram, and TikTok are legally able to sell private information such as names, phone numbers, email addresses.
“And now with large language models and AI, everything that’s ever been put on Facebook is being used to train artificial intelligence for Facebook. Same for Tiktok, and the same for YouTube, and same for Instagram and all those other places. Everything is doing this.”
The internet is still rather new and harbors many unknowns that we as a collective generation have not yet discovered. As the internet continues to evolve rapidly, we must learn to slow down.
“We’ve got lots of evidence to say that no matter what you think is not going to happen, can happen. And we’re all living in the public eye, there’s no way to avoid this,” said Winiecki. “Everybody has a video camera with them 100% of the time these days. And when we add information to our social media, we’re allowing other people to decide whatever it is they want about what we’ve written.”
So how can we erase our social media trail? It is harder than you think and goes beyond deleting your Instagram account.
“There are tools that allow you to delete your history, your entire history, back to ground zero. So you can delete everything that’s out there,” said Winiecki. “But if somebody has retweeted it, you can’t get that back.”
Essentially, it is possible to erase all that you have posted or shared online, however, if anyone retweeted it, screenshotted it, or saved it, it is no longer under your control. Some social media sites even reserve the right to use your photos and videos as well, another detail in the often neglected terms and conditions.
Instagram’s privacy policy states, “When you share, post, or upload content that is covered by intellectual property rights (like photos or videos) on or in connection with our Service, you hereby grant to us a non-exclusive, royalty-free, transferable, sub-licensable, worldwide license to host, use, distribute, modify, run, copy, publicly perform or display, translate, and create derivative works of your content”
Meaning that Instagram has the right to license and disburse photos and videos posted on their platform with no legal obligation to compensate the owner.
To protect privacy and limit online presence, users can adjust privacy settings to manually approve those who view accounts, check for updated password leaks, disable add tracking and location services, and delete all accounts no longer in use.
“Authors do not control what they write,” said Winiecki, “The readers and the interpreters, control what has been written, and we really do have to, I think, think twice, slow down.”
According to Winnecki we have not coexisted long enough with technology and social media to truly understand its depths and impending consequences. The only thing we can ensure is how we interact with social media on our own.
“We’re in a wild west,” said Winiecki. “We really don’t know what’s going to happen.”
It is unrealistic to cut social media out of our daily lives, we rely on these apps for interaction and entertainment daily, however, it is vital that we understand the power and uncertainty of the devices we hold.
