Social media is, un-ironically, the main avenue of social group interaction for most children and young adults in the United States. Social media has integrated so completely into the life of the modern American, to not participate is a social disadvantage. However, the common user is unaware of the Faustian bargain they strike with each new Terms of Service they blindly accept without reading. With over 90% of Americans under the age of 30 using one or more social media platforms (Perrin), what will happen to peoples’ expectations for their personal privacy as we advance further into an era of exponential technology and social media growth? Assuredly, the American people will see the final nail in the coffin of their personal privacy rights within two decades due the rapid adoption of increasingly invasive social media platforms.

If one were to leap past the days of AOL and chatrooms the primordial waters from which social media began is likely Myspace. Myspace was a place where anyone could create their own homepage on which they could express themselves in a myriad of ways. This was attractive to small time bands and narcissists alike, but what Myspace had that paved the way for all future social media platforms was two relatively simple features: the ability to search by name, and the ability to add friends. Mundane as they may appear compared to the websites of today, these key features allowed for students and coworkers to keep up with one another’s pages and to effectively organize all their friends into neat piles online. The reach it gave was unprecedented; never X could the average person be so prolific without the help of TV or Radio. This power to project autonomously was so desirable that many began to stop caring as to who they were friends with. The website had effectively gamified friend collection, and so the users were now sharing their personal profiles with anyone who sent them a seemingly benign friend request. 

Power of that caliber was so gratifying that the then small populous of people online were beginning to shed their constitutionally protected anonymity and create profiles. Which is exactly what anonymity once was, protected. It was a long-standing ideal that giving out information to strangers online was dangerous, just see the old Stanger Danger videos. They had entire volumes on not sharing personal information online. Yet into the wild west of the world-wide web many went without a pseudonym to guard them. The choice to stay offline and anonymous, or to join in on the burgeoning social media train with your peers was an easy one for most. At the time, there was little downside to creating a profile to on Myspace or Facebook or LinkedIn. It was too early to realize the inherent issues with Joe Blow telling the world his day to day activities, and what a slippery slope social media would become. 

The cornerstones of progress in the social platforms of today are marked by the adoption and implementation of new technologies. While in the beginning, these changes were to adapt to new web standards, the introduction of devices like smart phones and tablets has changed the nature of these updates. Not only does Facebook have the #1 messenger app in the world, but new forms of social media have sprung up entirely on mobile such as Snapchat and Instagram. Mobile devices are known collectively as “Fourth Screen” technology. These emerging Fourth Screen social media platforms are undeniably convenient, yet they tap into a part of the mobile phone that most fail to consider, the tracking features. 

Thanks to GPS, when a selfie is posted to Facebook from a smart phone, the phone can automatically insert the users’ location into the photo, and by default will. The advent of modern mobile social platforms was the largest blow to American privacy in all social media history. 90% of young adults and 50% of citizens now actively choose to update the entire world to their location and activities at regular intervals via the tracking device in their pockets (Perrin). (Combined two paragraphs) The aforementioned default is dangerous as well. Every social platform on the web has a setting menu, because every user is different. The problem begins when the developers start to assume the user will never look at the settings, because most do not. The setting on a social media site are where all the privacy rights you plan to fork over are deliberated. In the Facebook settings, for example, there are options for who can and cannot see the user profile. At the onset, these are set to global, meaning that anyone who finds the profile can see all of the information on it without that persons knowledge or explicit consent. This is one of many examples of the privacy choices the average user never makes, allowing the platform to deem what is done with their personal information. To any who would claim that they have nothing to hide therefore this poses no issue, Edward Snowden, a whistle blower and privacy rights activist would say “Arguing that you don't care about the right to privacy because you have nothing to hide is no different than saying you don't care about free speech because you have nothing to say”. Snowden warns that the world is not about any one person, and their personal lack of need for a right does not mean it is unnecessary. Furthermore, giving up a right because the individual does not think they will need it will only work until they find out you do.

This oversharing of locations and photos is only aided by the now standard two camera system on most major smart phone competitors. One camera that faces the world, and one that faces the users face. 20 years ago, when no one was using social platforms (Digital Trends Staff), the front facing camera would have been cast aside as a frivolous feature for exclusively the use of narcissists. Why then the dramatic shift in the culture of the country?

The whole point of a Facebook page, a Twitter account, or an Instagram feed is to build a comprehensive profile for yourself. As the purpose is to connect with friends and family, the goal is to make a page that feels like the user. So, then the page would have to be filled with the goings on of said user. What all activities a person does have in common, is themselves. It makes sense that selfie culture evolved from social media prevalence, because when making a profile to represent someone, pictures of that someone are imperative. 

It has become expected of one to share. While it used to be that political opinions were a private matter, in the recent election Facebook allowed users to choose to display their nominee of choice to the world. The modern consumer has been told they are important by the very nature of the social media system, and when someone feels important they share all their important thoughts. There is an inherent danger in that, because these thoughts accumulate. They are posted, then stored in a database on the websites servers forever, even if you delete the post from your page. Meaning that even the act of deleting can no longer save your privacy. If a court ordered Facebook to reproduce a photo someone deleted five years ago, they can and will comply. 

That power, overwhelming as it is, is not limited to just the courts. Employers now have a new well of information to draw from on ever new resume that crosses their desk. Most of the Fortune 500 companies do social media background checks on incoming employees. Simply put, the job at the animal shelter might be well within a person’s grasp until the employer sees that one year ago the applicant ranted about their disdain for cats. For some the self-incrimination is as much as a picture of a night drinking with friends (Hashmy-Elsby). However more unexpected, was when a British woman lost her job after posting pictures of her young baby in a bubble bath to her Facebook. After a few unfounded murmurs of pedophilia, she removed the post all but too late to save her job (Hashmy-Elsby). What startles the most is the leaps and bounds the industry has made to get here. What once started as a mode to communicate exclusively with friends, family, and coworkers has become a self-made evaluation form for current and future employers to peer into. 

What pushed social media to this point is the same driving force that pushes any technology to the next great innovation, capitalism. The market has consistently demanded better, faster, stronger machines with which to use more robust and refined social platforms. An entire country full of people all wanting to be more connected is the perfect environment for someone to make the next big app, like Snapchat, or to make the cultural cornerstone mobile product, like Apple. Like in any industry, some of the largest players are the ones the public does not see. When a passenger on a flight thinks about their ticket price, they consider the airline, not the plane manufacturer. As with social media, people think of Google, Apple, and Facebook without considering Big Data.

Big Data is, however, not the name of a company. Rather it is a term used to represent an entire industry that has sprung up around the internet age. Any time you log onto your email, the email provider gets a small log on your file making note that you logged in at that time. For every user on every computer this company will have a similar file (Rosen), and if properly applied they can learn incredible things about their users from the log in times alone. But no one man can interpret all that raw data, which is where Big Data companies come in. A company will be contracted to use specialized programs to interpret the data given, and with it they can tell a remarkable amount about their users without ever asking. For example, anyone who uses Google Maps has signed the terms of service to do so. In doing so they have allowed Google to compile data about their location even when they are not using Maps, which is why if that same person checked their Google account they would notice that it has already accurately guessed where and when they work every day (Marr).

 What Google does with its’ massive stores of data may be nice, even helpful. That is the goal of course, to use the data a user outputs to make their life easier, or more streamlined. It is not however a simple matter of guessing where someone works. Big Data knows more about most people today then their families do (Marr). This is because every time a keystroke is entered into a search engine, that data is sent away to a server and put into a profile. This system is always updating based on what a person does. This data collection is the gateway to the real profit point of Big Data, advertising, or more explicitly targeted advertising. 

Billboards are a great example of the old style of advertising. A room full of marketing professionals look at the demographics they want to sell too, and make up an ad to convince those specific demographics to buy. The ad is generalized and casts a wide net, referring to no one target buyer but rather the whole group of expected buyers. With the advent of Big Data, marketing has effectively gone from art to science. A machine can browse the target buyers search history and compile a short list of their interests. This same program will then scan a list of adds it has available and when it finds a match it displays the add to the user, all in the milliseconds it takes for the webpage they clicked on to load (Zuriek). This personalized marketing or “Targeted Advertising” is not only legal, but highly profitable. The company who wants to sell gets connected directly to the populous who wants to buy, in theory. However, this billion-dollar industry (Marr) isn’t fueled simply by searches, as the Big Data monolith now moves into social media.

Social media is the icing on the cake for Big Data, as it puts a face and name to the otherwise anonymous string of number it was once marketing too. Every computer has an IP address, much like a digital mailbox. It is the exact street address necessary for one computer to communicate with another. Big Data knows the targets IP address, unsurprisingly, but what they don’t know is who the person on the other end is. But in the last five years social media platforms have updated their terms of service to get in on the Big Data profits (Chinni). Now if the Big Data programs see a Facebook login on an IP address, they update the profile. Not with just the name, nor just the face, but rather with all the info they computer can easily categorize from the user profile (Zuriek). These programs even go so far as to consider the people on a user’s friends list to create a more accurate profile of the user, assuming their interests are the average of their peers.

But what, exactly, is the harm to such a system? If the cloud knows all the world’s favorite TV shows and what time they get to work, who gets hurt? Furthermore, social media is great for connectivity, the world has never had this much access to the opinions and lives of everyone. Big Data and declining privacy are the side effects of a genuinely beneficial system, as social media progresses so too does the society it represents. Americans are more aware of individual lives and stories across the nation thanks to platforms like Twitter, and movement that span coast to coast such as the growing support for LGBTQ rights and Occupy Wall street were born entirely out of social media connectivity and passion.

It is to the former that a citizen must look with caution, as an American citizen the right to privacy is one of the first and most important. Social media is not a problem; it is a reaction to a problem. Everybody wants to be famous. With the internet gaining so much clout in popular culture, being an internet star is not only feasible but common. Problematically the more you give to the world, the less you have for yourself. If the American people become accustomed to a lack of privacy, it will not be long before it is swept from under them completely and they will forget to notice (Rosen). In very Orwellian fashion the people have begun to self-monitor and it shows no signs of slowing unless they slow it themselves. As of today, no one is forcing the populace to participate in “Throwback Thursdays”. There will come a day where that notion will be a fantasy of a distant past wherein the people could still choose what they wanted to share. As the advancing surveillance state moves forward the country may seem more like 1984 than America, as the citizens will not know when or if they are being observed, sharing everything all the time more efficiently than Mark Zuckerberg could ever hope.

The buck stops at the people of the nation to change the way they look at privacy in their social media. Every new platform has some newly invasive terms of service for the users to blindly accept. It is the very same blind acceptance that will drive the country down this path of oversharing and Big Data compliance. There are few statements more frenzied than those akin to “They want you to remain ignorant.”. Which is why it is so painful to point out that they do in fact want you to remain very ignorant. The laws in the United States are rapidly evolving to favor the near endless conifers of Bid Data and lend themselves to ending net neutrality. It is in the countries best interest as a collective if the oversharing stops. Not just because the employers may see, not just because one day the next generation will see, rather because in this lifetime Americans will see the repercussions of their social media based life, when all the privacy once constitutionally protected has been willingly relinquished to no one in particular, for no reason other than everyone else was doing it. 
