What a world we live in! For our older generation, it is great puzzle on why we have extremely inter-twined, complicated lifestyles because of the very devices and platforms that were built to achieve the contrary. Now, I live in the so called most expensive city in the world, and during commuting to and from work everyday, I see how much people are invested in them. Literally, all they do is stare at a screen. Jokingly we say that even the person next to them drop dead, they wouldn’t even notice! But due to a recent Ted talk and a few articles I came across, I was able to kind of make a conscious decision to jump into a third person perspective when using social media myself.
Being a developer, I know how easy it is to collect information from a user, and how often the users are not even are aware about how much data points they provide to a platform. Usually when I generally discuss something related to this topic with somebody, about 90% of the people automatically respond like “what could they do by collecting data from a person like me! I don’t think a person would create much of an impact, right?”. Wrong! Remember little things matter. Even though your individual data is infinitesimal, when similar minded people are categorised together and a set is made, the collective data set is massively effective. There can be, or should I say there ARE obvious patterns of behaviour which are evident — and those are the analytics which are used by advertising platforms to extrapolate and feed you information about something that you might be interested in.
Over the next couple of articles I will take a few very “innocent” data that we usually add in our social media accounts and show how much a platform can extrapolate upon that. Just to give you a taste of what I meant by that take the following example!
Something that we all add to social media is our marital status. I recently got married and updated to the personal information is that I am married to my beautiful wife. Now there was a massive dopamine hit when all my friends and loved ones rushed in to say congrats, which is the exact reason why we post on social media, but do you know what Facebook did in the background? It added me into a separate set of people / profiles which consists of everybody who are recently married. When I went to my advertisement preferences, it showed me that I am in the categories such as “Recently Married”, “Friends of Recently Married”, “September Wedding”, etc. So all the ads I was seeing were Flowers, Family Planning Products, Honeymoon Destinations, Other couples who got married, Fragrances, Chocolates and whatnot! And I am pretty sure, because I got married, all the friends I interact through facebook has also being added to that set “Friends of recently married”. Do you see now how social media can EXTRAPOLATE on a single datapoint given by a single user? How they understand behavioural patterns? and most importantly, what they can do with those data?
Let’s go over a few others in the next one! Till then, take care! :)
