Are Social Media users Trading Privacy for Convenience?

Since the technology is growing at supersonic speed, it is a fact that our way of communicating people change drastically with the help of social media and platforms.

Now there are thousands of apps and websites available in the market like Facebook, Twitter etc. from where you can share about your daily activities with your friends and family members. However, the addiction of following the social media trends making users share bizarre things, which should not be shared on social platforms.

And sadly, to be a part of this so-called social trends, we are trading something very valuable, which is our online privacy.

How users sharing their Data with Social Platforms Unintentionally

There is no doubt about advancement in the digital sector makes our life easy since we do not have to plan meetups with our family and friends to connect with them. And this online socializing method leads to reduce the cost of living.

However, while enjoying likes, comments, and movements on these social platforms and apps, your data has been analyzed to figure it out what you like to do on each day by these social platforms.

Have you ever imagine that why all of the time you get the ads of only those things which you really like to do or the things you want to buy? This happens because when you share different things on these social platforms without having a consent to go through their privacy policies.

In this way, you indirectly permit them to collect your data, which they used it to target users mind and thus through a slow process these online social platforms getting your personal data by providing you so-called convenience.

Finally, these social platforms gather enough user’s data to control their mind and make them their puppets without letting them know.

They use different algorithms and matrices to target your decision making according to their will, and it seems like you are making your own decision and spending, butactually it is not.

In short, for the sake of convenience, we provide these social platforms opportunities to control our mind by using different algorithms based on our personal data.

However, by following some steps, there is still a way to get free from the cage of these social platforms and enjoy our life according to our own decisions and rules.

 How to Take Back Control of Our Data

The digital world is in ultimate need of online privacy regulations and policies. After what Facebook did recently, one thing is clear, that all of these social platforms operate their functions based on the user’s data they collect.

Without giving you any fake hope regarding how you can stop trading data for convenience, I want to clarify that there is no way to control your data entirely while using these social platforms.

However, by following five basic steps, I think anyone can protect their data from going into the hands of these social platforms:

Disable “Opt-in” in Default Settings

All the social platforms now ask permission to share or use your information according to their need and make your experience better while using their app and website.

Never enable that option by believing that your experience will get better according to your demands, it’s a trap because they actually use and share your data to control your mind.

Therefore, if you want to save yourselves from not become a puppet of these social platforms, disable this feature right now.

Control Your Data by Changing Privacy Settings

Thanks to GDPR and recent Facebook and Cambridge Analytica case, because these social platforms are providing different options in the privacy settings to control data.

So if you make a little effort to go through the privacy settings of renowned platforms, you will notice they are different information available that gives you right to control what kind of data you want to share publicly.

For this go through data privacy options and uncheck all the boxes of different categories of data, which you think that sharing this kind of information might put you in trouble.

Enable “Notification” Settings

If you ever bother to go through the privacy policy of the social platforms that you use on a daily basis, one statement never changes which says “We have the right to change our privacy and data sharing policy anytime,” which is not topping situation for users.

Just imagine you set your settings to limit these social platforms for not collecting your data, and they suddenly change their policy and mold the situation right away in their favor to make most out of it.

For this enable notification setting on these social platforms where it is available so you will get a notification every single time when they make any changes. In this way, you can opt in the privacy settings again without compromising your data.

Limit Different Apps on Different Social Platforms

Social platforms like Facebook offer different socializing apps within their platforms that require your data to operate. First of all, I would recommend social media users try to avoid these apps through any social platforms.

However, if you think that these apps on social media help you drastically in doing you are socializing, I would suggest you limit the access to these apps when you are not using them.

Use Secure Social Platforms

If the steps mentioned above still do not work perfectly for you, use different secure social platforms to get ultimate privacy with convenience

Final Verdict

It is a reality that most of the social media users trading their privacy for the sake of convenience and keeps themselves up-to-date. There is no denying that data is the core element for these social platforms to provide different modes of socializing to its users.

But the amount of data that users are ready to trade for their convenience is actually making them puppets of these social giants, which is needed to balance.

However if these online users use different privacy options and setting intelligently, they can limit these social platforms from using the part of data which should not be publically shared