In digital space, users are increasingly being shaped as commodities by various sites and services.
LAST week, social photo-sharing application Instagram caused an uproar when it announced changes to its terms and conditions.
The
changes were related to its advertising policy, and were interpreted by
many people as the company reserving the right to share user
information and pictures with advertisers (or to be used in advertising)
without permission.
Instagram has since reversed that policy and
apologised for the “confusing” language, stating: “Legal documents are
easy to misinterpret.” (You can read its response at
http://bit.ly/U79Nld.)
This seems to have pacified some users,
but many are still fuming, while others have opted to try different
photo-sharing apps as an alternative.
There are two primary
issues with this. One is a privacy issue, in that the company would even
consider sharing user information and pictures with its parent company
Facebook and other third-party organisations (including advertisers).
The
other is copyright; in the same response, Instagram co-founder Kevin
Systrom wrote: “Instagram users own their content and Instagram does not
claim any ownership rights over your photos. Nothing about this has
changed.”
Users had every right to be upset. These are serious
issues with severe repercussions, and it is becoming more and more
common that online sites and applications are usurping the rights and
control of their users. Facebook’s constant changing of privacy settings
is legendary. The deeper we embed ourselves within such social network
sites, the more we seem to get walled in.
As the days wear on, we
find it increasingly harder to escape – most of our connections are in
our social network of choice, our memories are stored within our
profiles, and we are relying on it to be our source of information.
In
many cases, we have come to depend on it for almost all of our
interactions – we no longer need to remember people’s birthdays, we can
send messages to each other conveniently without the need to store
addresses, and we can broadcast our lives to all our friends at the
click of a mouse.
Whether or not the reliance on such technology
is a good thing is a different debate, but the fact is that the services
these sites provide – it doesn’t matter if we never needed them before –
are extremely useful.
However, many users don’t realise that
this is still a service. Such technology has become so embedded in our
lives that many of us have taken it for granted.
The fact that it
is also primarily operated on the Internet has contributed to this
sense of entitlement. Why buy newspapers when you get the news online
for free? How many of us still send text messages via SMS now that there
is iMessage, Blackberry Messenger and WhatsApp? With Skype and Viber,
who needs to make traditional phone calls?
In some cases, it is
easy to see how the companies behind them are making money. Newspapers
now provide news for free (some have paywalls) with the hope of driving
more traffic to their sites, which are plastered with advertising.
Apple
and RIM, the maker of the Blackberry, promote their messaging systems
to encourage people to buy their devices. Skype has a premium service
that users can pay for as well as cheaper computer-to-phone rates which
helps supplement its income. In that sense, the products these companies
offer are obvious.
Social network sites like Facebook, Instagram and Twitter also have a product: You and me.
What
they essentially do is no different from the media outlets – they sell
their user base to advertisers. Unlike the print and broadcast media,
however, these sites tend to have more information on their users which
can be sorted or mined to help advertisers reach their target market.
Each
update we post on these sites contains more information about our lives
and what interests us – whether it’s in the words we use, the places we
check in from or the photos we upload. And they have a lot of
information. Citing European policy law, a student from the University
of Vienna made a request to Facebook to hand over all the information it
had on him. And Facebook provided it – all 1,200 pages of it.
The
point here isn’t about how scary it is that a company has so much
information on each of us – this too is a different debate.
The
concern is that as technology advances, we are increasingly being shaped
to be a product, and this is an awareness we have to carry with us
constantly. It is pertinent to note that this is not a new phenomenon –
the whole basis of the advertising industry is based on consumers being
the product.
This is why newspapers are able to subsidise
publishing costs to sell their products at a relatively low price (or in
some cases, offer it for free) and why we get to watch television for
“free”. Or pay very little.
We need this awareness because it
will help us make decisions about how we navigate our digital lives. It
will also help us reclaim some of the control – and our rights.
Instagram
may have reversed that new policy for now, but there’s no saying it
won’t come back in another form. Facebook has gotten away for many years
with changes that its users do not like because few people are willing
to walk away from it.
This is not to suggest that what these
companies are doing is right. But the adage that nothing is free rings
true in this situation. There are alternatives but each comes with a
price.
The alternatives to these sites – some of which are on
open-source platforms – may not be as polished and lack the critical
mass to be as effective as the big social sites. Then there are the
commercial entities which charge you (Flickr, for example, is
capitalising on a sudden exodus from Instagram to its platform, offering
its paying customers an additional three months of service).
It
is only by carrying this awareness with us always that we can truly make
the right decision – whether to stick with these companies, or stick it
to them.
ReWired By Niki Cheong
Niki has just completed his MA Digital Culture and Society at King’s College London. Connect with him at http://blog.nikicheong.com or
on Twitter via @nikicheong. Suggest topics and issues on digital
culture, or pose questions, via email or on Twitter using the
#Star2reWired hashtag.