So it turns out I’m a bad blogger who doesn’t carefully read the articles he links to. Yesterday’s post featured the story of a sex worker being outed by Facebook, and my suggestion that limiting different social media products to different online identities would probably help. It turns out that was exactly what Leila, the sex worker in question, had done. She only used Facebook in her private life, but still it started linking to her work social contact. My bad for not paying attention. I should probably be punished.
In my defense, I will say that it’s likely the information leakage occurred through the path I did actually identify in the post – smart phone or tablets linked with social media. It’s feasible to set-up a PC with distinct user accounts and strictly enforced separation of data and identities. It’s almost impossible to do that for other devices. And while you could obviously just use physically distinct devices for each online identity, the reason we have these devices is for convenience. Even if you carry two phones, at some point you’ll want to share data between them, and as soon as you do, there’s an opportunity for tech companies to sneak in and exploit it.
The fundamental problem here is that users are not the customers of social media – they’re the product. The advertisers are the customers. The more data the media companies have on their users/product the better they can target it for their customers. So their goal is not to solve these kind of issues. It’s to do the absolute minimum necessary to stop the product getting mad enough to quit, while retaining the maximum amount of information for their advertisers. As a tech guy I can understand that, but as a kinky sex blogger and social media user, it definitely sucks.
It’s an entirely solvable problem from a technology perspective, but the incentive structure for the companies isn’t in place to do so. That leaves people with multiple online identities with limited options. Either never use social media anywhere, or give up anonymity, or keep separate devices for each identity and be incredibly careful to never link or associate them in any way. Or, I guess, roll the dice and hope Facebook doesn’t pop up one of those annoying ‘Your friends liked…’ ads for your local kinky munch on your mom’s Facebook feed.
I’ve no idea what an appropriate image for this post would be, so I’ll continue the masquerade mask theme from yesterday. I’m afraid I have no idea what’s going on in this image, or who it’s originally by, but I would love to attend the kind of parties that featured masked topless ladies drinking wine and brandishing knives.