My Thoughts On Reading 6 : LJ3

    I think that the past weeks readings have been very eye opening. It is absolutely horrifying to think of all of the data online sites could be collecting from us just because we follow an influencer and interact with people online. It is especially eye opening because this has already effected me in real life. I guess someone I interacted with on Tik Tok stole my credit card information. I didn't think this was possible until I called my bank and they explained Tik Tok has been experiencing this issue a lot recently. Influencers have been making fake accounts and somehow collecting peoples data once someone interacts with their page. 

    The ethics of this is crazy. You would think Tik Tok would care about their users and nip this in the bud immediately. But, most companies don't care unless things get very bad for their users. Look at Facebook- they didn't stop pushing pictures of photoshopped women to depressed and body dysmorphic young ladies until they got caught and people were dying. It is scary to think how much data is collected, and also how scary it probably was for Facebook to collect as much data as they needed to find out which girls would be down enough to get those perfect female body images pushed to them. That data collected was used for evil and that is simply not okay.

    I suppose though, collecting data for a small business, or even a big business, is not a terrible thing. You learn about your target audience and see what they want to see. As long as companies collect data for good rather than bad- there isn't really a problem. Though, you can't measure something like that. You never know how bad it is until you have people up in arms about how a social media site is operating.  

    Knowing all of this makes me want to pull back, especially after doing my time study. 2-3 hours on Tik Tok is a little crazy. I hope that in my professional stand point, I will be able to stay away from all of these sites that collect massive amounts of data. These online sites can definitely help businesses, but for my own needs- I do not need to use these.