In some of the music communities I’m in the content creators are already telling their userbase to go follow them on threads. They’re all talking about some kind of beef between Elon and Mark and the possibility of a boxing match… Mark was right to call the people he’s leaching off of fucking idiots.
I’ve been online for years and years. Enough to know that, we’ve been giving our data away before social media took off. Social Media and search engines like Google, have accelerated it and made it a farming thing as the basis of their foundations.
So what I’m referring to about giving our data away before the social media era, is that we have registered on to forums and we have registered to chat rooms and other services. We willingly gave them our names, even beneath the screen names we registered under. We willingly discussed a lot of ourselves within those forums and we can’t preemptively assume that they aren’t keeping some record of what we’re doing and saying. We know all sites keep a stamp of our IP addresses, so it’s a safe bet that they’re also collecting everything we do within their site’s boundaries.
I’m not trying to say that we should all just expose ourselves, en masse. But I will say that you are responsible and you’ve been responsible for what you decide to put there online. You are right to be questioning and working against things like Google needing your street address to recover a simple password when there had been other proven methods to recover your password by. However, it comes off a little ridiculous when you’re griping about privacy while also being someone who dumps their life stories on that platform or this platform.
There was always a line though between “i’m sharing this personal information with you privately” (i.e. registering with your name and e-mail address), and “I’m sharing this information with the general public”. You also were able to remain somewhat anonymous, by registering with your real name but making sure other users only saw your screen name.
While there was always the threat of someone finding your publicly shared photos or stories and using them for nefarious purposes, the idea of the company you’re giving them to analyzing all of that private and public data, across the entire web thanks to tracking cookies, and using it to manipulate you or packaging it up and selling it was never really a concern. No one had the capabilities to analyze that much data 10-15 years ago, and if they did it wasn’t yet profitable.
The idea that you now have zero control over how your personal and private data is used, or who it’s sold to, is terrifying.