A while back, I was talking to a friend of mine about a dress I wanted to wear for my birthday, describing it in detail. Later that day, I open Instagram and start scrolling, as usual, however, this time, the first ad that pops up is attempting to sell me exactly what I had earlier described. This experience seems to be common, and for many people goes by relatively unnoticed. But when exactly did we all consent to companies invading our private lives like this?
By now, everyone is familiar with the concept of vocal assistants in smartphones. To use these programs, you must consent to your phone listening to all your conversations on the off chance of hearing that ‘hey Siri’.
However, does this consent really extend to ads that are catered to your conversations. I personally don’t remember ever agreeing to that. The terms and conditions for Instagram’s use vaguely say that ‘The manner, mode and extent of such advertising and promotions are subject to change without specific notice to you.’ This does provide them with a pretty wide protective barrier when it comes to legal liability, but does this absolve them from any responsibility to their users?
The first, and most obvious issue, is the outright breach of privacy. There’s a million ways this could develop into an actual threat to the identity of a person, and we’ve all probably already heard about the scary hacker pretending to be us using documents stolen from our ‘sent’ email folder. They also tend to be pretty aggressive, showing up very often and leaving little to do besides paying for a website you’d only use like once or twice in your life.
This could be resolved by stopping certain apps from having access to your microphone (which they always ask when you first start using it). But when you do that, and you are someone that frequently posts content online, the use of social media apps without full access to a camera becomes somewhat obsolete. In this way, social media apps seem to ‘force’ you to keep your microphone on.
However, Facebook and Instagram have over 3 billion users combined, and listening to just half of these users’ conversations would be a tricky task to tackle: 35% of Facebook’s users speak a language other than English, which would involve a developed system that not only displays the app in the person’s specific language, but is also able to understand, process and store all that data. They already have in place plenty of other marketing mechanisms (which may admittedly be even scarier than phones listening in) in place on most shopping websites to collect and use your data. They also probably don’t care enough to listen in anyway, but the fact that they could is scary in itself.
In regards to this potential danger, the law seems to be slow to keep up. The European Commission implemented the General Data Protection Regulation in 2018, which was incorporated into UK legislation in the same year. Both generally protect the same freedoms for the average consumer of online content: clear and understandable data about who’s processing what and for what reason, ability to request a service provider for the data they have about you, the company's’ obligation to inform you if data was stolen or lost if this could have a harmful effect on you. However, where both of these fall short is the practical application. While the GDPR provides for the individual to be informed if their data is used outside the EU, so far I’ve not come across one major platform that has informed me about anything similar to that, even if most of them are based outside the EU. Same can be said about the clear and simple description of where your data goes to. So far, major social media companies seem to hide under a simple similar statement: ‘The manner, mode and extent of such advertising and promotions are subject to change without specific notice to you.’ This allows for too much freedom against the usual consumer, who should be entitled to knowing about any change that goes in processing their data.
For the time being, it doesn’t seem like anybody has an answer to why ads sometimes seem to be based off the content of private conversations, and there doesn’t seem to be much legal protection for the average consumer for these kinds of breaches of data. Let’s just hope that this is just a conspiracy theory, and if it’s not that this technology remains just for advertising dresses and nothing more sinister.
By Andreea Dicu