The TikTok Heist (It's All About the Data)
The social networks have us right where they want us. Addicted as we are, plugged in as we are, we feed data to the beast—product searches, social media preferences, movie picks, book reviews, the bars and restaurants we frequent, vacation destinations, music preferences, sexual preferences, political preferences, animal preferences, any old preference. They eat our data, devour it, store it away like fat for the winter. They use that data to create unique user profiles. And what do they do with that profile? They sell it to advertisers—makeup brands, resort destinations, bespoke journal makers, whomever—who target you with products tailored to your liking.
To call it an invasion of privacy is a misnomer. There’s no invasion. It’s a simple exchange of commodities: We give them our personal data in exchange for the illusion of a public platform. And in a sense, this is how an efficient free market is supposed to work. We give something to get something. But in a digital world that’s not quite so transparent, do we always know what we’re giving? Are we certain which data is scraped from our social media profiles and which is not? Even more, do we know what’s happening to that data?
Over the last two weeks, the social platform TikTok has been in the news. (Full disclosure I am not a TikTok user.) I first caught wind of the debate when President Trump floated the idea of banning the video-sharing platform in the United States. And admittedly, I was tempted to believe the move was a distraction technique. After all, the pandemic has been nothing short of an unmitigated disaster. But instead of reacting to the news, instead of taking to Twitter or Facebook, I did a little digging. I searched for the center of truth. And what was that center of truth?
According to the Wall Street Journal, TikTok created a work-around allowing it to mine data from millions of users who utilized the platform on a Google Android device. But that’s not all. According to the Journal:
The identifiers collected by TikTok, called MAC addresses, are most commonly used for advertising purposes. The White House has said it is worried that users’ data could be obtained by the Chinese government and used to build detailed dossiers on individuals for blackmail or espionage.
(Follow this link to read the article in its entirety.)
I’m no expert in data collection, digital marketing, or international espionage. And sure, TikTok’s collection of user data might have been innocent. It might have been for advertising purposes, just like the other social media companies. (This is, in fact, TikTok’s claim.) Still, it begs the question: Who regulates, governs, and protects against the mismanagement of your personal data? Do we really trust the social media companies to govern themselves, particularly when there’s such an incentive to turn a buck on personal data?
At the beginning of this series, I made a bold claim: Social media companies are running a giant Ponzi scheme, one in which they promise downstream influence to those who pass personal data upstream. But what happens when the Ponzi scheme crumbles? What happens when the tech giants have scraped your data clean but can’t deliver any more influence? Worse yet, what happens when they sell that data to the highest bidder, a bidder with potentially harmful aims? When that day comes (and it will come), will all this social media wrangling have been worth it?