We Are Data: lj 2

 

After reading We Are Data by John Chenney-Lippold, I was met with a variety of emotions, both fascinated and fearful, impressed and horrified. I have always been aware that the internet is not a welcoming place for those that do not understand how it operates, especially when it comes to retaining, sharing, and publicizing users’ data. Never would I have thought that every facet of my own existence, such as my face, my name, my habits, or even my emotion could be extracted and turned into relevant data that benefits different divisions within the digitalized world. Be it the government, my school, my social media, or even my favorite online shopping site, everyone can and will find a use case for my information.

  On the internet, users are broken down into data, and these data are always being monitored. However, the data that big companies like Google, Yahoo, Twitter,… extracted from their users do not always represent what the users are in real life. One of the reasons for this phenomenon is that the algorithmic agents, the very thing that gather bits of users’ data and create different identities based on that information, do so on their own term (Lippold, 2017). People are inherently different from how they appear on the internet. Someone that is active and outgoing on their social media account might not actually appear that way off the internet. The algorithms, at the end of the day, are just machines that collect what were provided by users, being intentionally or unintentionally, and sharing those bits of data figure to other services like personalized ads or job offers. 

               People made from data are not the same as people made from atoms (Lippold, 2017). Or in other words, whatever data that represents me on the internet does not correlate with my actual self. Despite knowing this, I am still very wary about how I conduct myself around many different social media platforms. Even though I do not have an account in any of those platforms now. Sooner or later, I will find myself needing one, either for business purposes or personal use. To maximize productivity and minimize unwanted side effects, I will just stick with my list of Do’s and Don’ts for social media, which mainly has to do with oversharing and information confidentiality.  

                It is tough to say whether the act of unauthorized information collecting violates the codes of ethics. All in all, once someone decides to go on the internet or be part of any type of social media platform, they are subjected to the website’s rules and regulations, some of which might contain the very act of collecting users’ data, either for improvement or other private purposes. The best course of action right now is to be informed about the inherent danger of the world wide web. Think twice before sharing something because once it is uploaded to the internet, it is technically there forever.  

 

Citations: 

Cheney-Lippold, J. (2017). We are data algorithms and the making of our Digital Selves. New York University Press.