The highly-anticipated KingsChat-CeFlix Social Media Week kicked off last night, Sunday, July 26th, with several great lectures on the world wide web.
One of the courses, called ‘Privacy Violations – The Dark Side of Social Media,’ highlighted the dangers of using social media platforms and the possible consequences of sharing personal information.
Every time we browse the internet and use social media, we leave a digital footprint of information about ourselves. That information can both be data that we type in ourselves, like birthday, name, email address, and personal details derived from likes, shares and behavior on the platforms.
Social media platforms like Facebook keep track of every move of their users and save them. If you have deleted a post on your profile, or you maybe only wrote a draft that was never published, the platform still has it in its database.
After yesterday’s lectures, three panelists answered questions from the audience.
Third parties benefitting from your data
All of the information that social media platforms like Facebook gather about you can be used by third parties. It is not like Facebook exactly sells your information to third parties, but they do sell access to you and your timeline in order to create targeted ads to you.
There are several shady examples of Facebook and third parties collecting data from Facebook users.
In 2010, The Wall Street Journal did an investigation where they found that many of the most popular apps on Facebook, including FarmVille and Quiz Planet, were transmitting identifying information about users and their friends to advertising and tracking companies.
Eight years later, Facebook found itself in one of the biggest cases of privacy violations along with the consulting firm Cambridge Analytica. The company was collecting data from Facebook users after they agreed to take a psychology questionnaire.
In order to start the questionnaire, you had to log in to your Facebook account, and this made it possible for Cambridge Analytica to access the data of the person who took the survey and also all of the data of that person’s Facebook friends.
The data was then used to try to sway peoples’ beliefs in hopes that they would vote for a certain politician at an election. It is believed that Cambridge Analytica got a hold of the information of 87 million Facebook users.
Third-party personal information disclosure is only one of the consequences you can face on social media. You can find the entire lecture and other consequences on CeFlix.
The Social Media Week ends on August 1st.
No worries on KingsChat
The training concluded that in order to stay safe online, KingsChat and other apps and websites from the LoveWorld community are good alternatives.
On KingsChat, you can chat with your friends, make calls, read news, write posts and much much more, but the social media platform is based on Christian values and, therefore, will not lead you down the wrong path or exploit your information.
On KingsChat there are also superusers, and they really add a sense of credibility to the site that platforms like Facebook do not have because not everyone can become superusers.
You need to get approved by the ministry to become a superuser, so in that way, you know that the person behind the superuser is actually who he says he is and that he has good intentions.
Furthermore, you have nothing to worry about when it comes to third parties on the ministry’s apps and sites, since they do not even feature ads from outside the ministry.