They say if something's not in the Internet, it's like it desn't evem exist and something similar happens when someone does not have a profile in any of the many social media available. We're all in but do we know what that implies?
Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, Linkedin, TikTok… and we could keep on going, since the amount of social networks we have at reach nowadays is huge, and it would be quite a shock if we didn't have an account in at least one of them, or several. But… are we aware of the implications of being in social media? Do we know who manages our data once we log in?
It is a reality that social media have lots of advantages and offer us multiple possibilities, but one also needs to be careful, know the risks and know how to manage them as best as possible. For the last few years we've seen movies and TV shows depicting social networks and the influence they may have on users. Such as "The Social Network", "Black Mirror", "You", etc. They are fiction, that's true, but as we have seen they are not that far from reality.
Have you ever read the terms and conditions when signing up to a social media profile? It's not something people usually do, we often lie when we click the checkbox that says "I have read and accept the terms and conditions"; a lie motivated mostly out of the lenght and complexity of the texts, however it is important to be aware of those.
What do we accept when clicking that button? Those conditions depend on the company you sign up to, but all in all, almost all of them share important common points such as access to user data, movement tracking and even license to use the information you upload to your profiles. That affects lots of things, some of them more noticeable than others, such as for example receiving advertisements particularly focused on the user.
It is usual for social media users to share more personal information than what is necessary, thus exposing too much information that you hardly control
Now in a different line of though, apart from the terms and conditions, it is also important to learn about the risks that affect our privacy. For the last years, we've also seen how several of the most important social media at international level suffered security leaks. While it's true there are things we can't control, there are others that are under our control:
Simple. Fast. With no complex installations.
At this pont, maybe quite depressed in face of the risks of social networks, let's see what we can do to protect our information as much as possible.
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