Ills of Social Media, How to Overcome Them
By Azam Majeed (Nov-23, 2017)
azam.majeed@gmail.com
After internet, Social Media is a big fact and there is no denying it. But it has lot of ills associated to it like privacy. Privacy has to much hidden in it, its your personal, financial, social, intellectual in-short it a very much of YOU. As there is no way to escape it but to avoid the dark side of it to be exploited against you.
Let me explain this to you how bad is social media as compared to google.com. If a an average college student uses google.com for 10 search a day for searching, google will make is profile of those almost 10 keywords which are actually less than those words which are repeatedly searched may be 3 words. On the other hand using a social media app like Facebook a average user might go through 50 posts a day on average, and giving comments or ranks like "liked, unliked" etc. If a facebook posted is linked to at-least 5 keywords, this mean an average user gave facebook 50x5=250 keywords at-least a day to help facebook robot make his/her personality to be build. Sadly more intelligent the user more keywords will he/she present to facebook by "commenting" on posts means giving even more keywords to robot of Facebook to make his personality. And this mean he extraordinary robot can market you contents accordingly to help it build more related keyword asap to make sure personality profile is perfected and And the same facebook or other social media is tracking to locations too. So if you happen to fall in bad list of the enemy who know you worth and knows you locations than what else he need to hurt you. In this scenario every individual is given a cap depending upon his capabilities, and his is been tracked on virtual earth, which is accessible to any one who can pay for it govt or individual. So if an extraordinarily person using social media happened to be disappeared suddenly, like one MBBS student of Karachi, and professor of Punjab university cought after in contact with extremists like ISIS.
Two most recent examples are Blue Whale App and unknown groups that used Pakistani students to be mis-lead and recruited by terrorists through their social media account.
Apps like Facebook and Twitter has become so sophisticated that each 'Post', 'Like' ,'Comment' and even the data of the games you play on these websites is analyzed and processed to draw the potential of that user. This could easily be taped to work against a country making 'brain drain' of that user by target marketing him. And creating artificial "
QAHAT-UR-RIJAAL".
(Image: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_media)
More interestingly,
- social media account is linked to email accounts
- linking email accounts to mobile numbers,
- mobile numbers to CNIC
- CNICs linked to Bank Accounts, NTN , Motor registration etc
And US has already hacked NADRA to get CNIC of Pakistanis.
Pakistanis are virtually exposed to the world because every thing else (Bank Accounts, NTN , Motor registration etc) is linked to CNICs. To extent of non-sense and ignorance of Pakistan IT ministry, officials has very recently requested Facebook to link Facebook accounts to mobiles numbers. Which is Facebook has refused to do. Similarly Social Media and application like Whatapp threat to national security. Or govt should ban these services until full and unconditional access to these accounts is made available to respective National Agencies.
How hard it is for Pakistan to persuade only those (out of hundreds of ) social media platforms to operate in the country those are willing to setup their local offices and agree to grant full access to the authorities to monitor accounts registered in the country in helping fighting terrorism. It is a lucrative market of 180 million.
(Image: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_media)
Measures to counter It:
I have worked out few of strategies and these are good ones.
- First is to nip the evil in the bud, like some countries of the world has done by blocking the social media altogether like Iran and China or has their own local version of Apps like Facebook and twitter to protect the privacy of their people.
- Second is for making the enemy confused yet able to keep goods of it but not recommended as is expect their are some ways to get these social media accessible, or will be made available by their creators. The solution is to use one such account for whole family and all liked pages/interests for whole family under one account to confuse the robot, this has following safeguards
- Being shared social media account among family member from kids to grand parents, this account will be labeled by robot to a personality which don't exist really
- Secondly every user is timed to make least time to spend on it as all has to have some time
- Every family member is monitoring whats going on this shared account, especially elders doing accountability
- As this social media account has to be used on PC at home rather than smart phones, your location, mic and camera can be in you control compared the social media being used on smart phone these integrated peripherals are not physically be removed even in case of notebooks, as Facebook founder Mark himself admits this and covers his own webcam.
- Using social media on PC makes your contacts personal from the being visible to robot, as is the case if used on a smart phone.
This might look odd to some, but its just like family watching TV program sitting together compared to every family member watching TV in isolation and no check on what who is watching.
I mean to say is just do not present them in a plate, you do your part and ask Allah for help, instead of giving up hope. As our kids reaches to adult age male and female members can have two separate accounts in a house one for each gender as their gender specific pages/contents.
Having said all this, first measure is to be taken at Govt. level, and second measure is to be taken at your end. And third option is to make Govt. take this such measure as our collective responsibility as one can't keep their kids at home whole life. May Allah protect us all, Aameen.
Some of the most popular social media websites are Baidu Tieba, Facebook, Google+, Myspace, Instagram, LinkedIn, Pinterest, Snapchat, Tumblr, Twitter, Viber, VK, WeChat, Weibo, WhatsApp, and Wikia and messengers Apps like Whatsapp, Viber, Line, Facebook Messenger etc.
