In recent months i have been thinking (again) about my digital data in relation to my privacy. I have been thinking about what my objective is regarding keeping my digital data safe. From who, and why? This is topical because more and more details have been coming out about Facebook and other social media’s use and collection of data.
I have been pondering what my own personal next actions on my social media exposure was. Then I watched the Netflix Documentary The Great Hack. That movie reinforced to me that I am not able to justify keeping my some social media accounts. And the way I use others needs to change. First thing in my mind was do I keep or cancel Facebook. Even after scrubbing data off the account regularly there are just some things you cannot get rid of. I have been diligent not to post almost anything that is not already public. I just haven’t been 100% great at it all the time. The question that kept bothering me is what will I / can I do about it. That brought me to question what I was worried about? From there I started asking myself what my threat model.
I had to think for a while to figure out what is my threat model for data collected by social media companies. At first I just feel it is a bit creepy that any one company can have that much information on me. That is not a threat model. It just got me to further realise in this day and age there will be data about my life leaked to companies. What I do not want is one or a few companies having a huge collection of my life. That morphed my objective to see how can i minimise my data leakage so to speak. At the same time still getting value out of some of the services i use. That for me is the key. What am I really getting value out of? That is subjective to everyone. For me it came down to what is my social media use case? If I am going to keep hugging Twitter, Facebook, and even LinkedIn I should be clear to myself what my use case is of each of those services. Only then can I weigh the risks of what each platform collects on me. After that I can decide what I want to do about it. I use each platform and others for different reasons so each one has its own use case.
I got analyitcial and wrote up my own assesment of my use for each. As I wrote them out I realized this is more than one post. I will publish each as a post with their own summary of what i am going to do with the service. At present there are about 6 parts (this is part 1). First up on my list is Twitter.
This post is titled My Great Social Media Purge of 2019 (Part 1). I wrote it in the Fall of 2019. It is still very relevant however I only now am getting around to posting it.