People still use Facebook, but one revelation after another confirms that the company shares its users’ data in ways they neither realized nor expected.
Two prominent political examples of this were exposed when President Barack Obama’s presidential campaign and Cambridge Analytica, a vendor that sold data to Republican campaigns, acquired access to the profiles of nonconsenting Facebook users in 2012 and 2016, respectively. Data on the “friends” of people who downloaded apps and took surveys allowed campaigns to target voters, although it should be noted that they did so with scant success.
This week, we’ve learned that Facebook gave masses of putatively private information, including messages between Facebook friends, to companies such as Spotify, Amazon, Yahoo, Microsoft, and Netflix. The information was used by at least some companies (again) to target advertisements and products at users and their friends. A strangely large number of these companies claim never to have used the information, which of course makes it all the more suspicious how and why they gained access to it for years.
How do people of goodwill deal with this? It’s become all the rage on Capitol Hill to call for regulation of social media, and this sort of revelation is bound to amplify such calls. But regulation is not the answer, especially by lawmakers and bureaucrats who have amply demonstrated that they don’t even slightly understand computers or the Internet.
Either way, regulation of social media platforms cannot solve the problems that users are facing. Only the users themselves can do that.
People who create accounts on Facebook, Twitter, and other supposedly free services need to understand what this act entails. When you use services you’re not paying for, it’s not because they are free. It is because someone else is paying for them.
Because you don’t pay for Facebook, you are not Facebook’s customer. You are Facebook’s product. You are not the diner; you are on the menu.
[Read more: You, the user, are Facebook’s most profitable product]
In this case, that means that any and all information you share online is being mined, harvested, and otherwise used to persuade you to part with your money or perhaps your vote, for good or for ill.
The U.S. user population should be more savvy today than it once was. In the early days of social media, people lost their common sense. They started sharing far too much information. The younger generation is just starting to experience the kind of harms that oversharing can do to one’s career and future prospects.
That era is now over. And no matter how terrible Facebook’s perfidy becomes, the U.S. should not set out to create a federal department of social media regulation. Instead, social media users must make use of their brains as well.
[Read more: DC sues Facebook, alleging it violated consumer protection laws]
We are not calling on anyone to stop using online services they find useful. But once you realize you’re going to be treated like a product, it should change the way you use and share on a platform like Facebook. It goes without saying that you shouldn’t share information you don’t want to appear on the front page of your local newspaper.
In the end, the regulatory process is neither a competent arbiter of social media nor an adequate substitute for private individuals’ and parents’ common sense. Let the nonpaying user beware.
