A walled garden thus gains insight and access to all parts of your life, giving you fantastic offers that are a perfect fit for you. But in the current era where Facebook is held accountable for the way it handles data, walled garden social media is a privacy hell.
Not only does an organization like WeChat have access to privacy-sensitive data of all their users, a platform that is so large can also easily be used to spread fake news or to apply censorship . You can imagine that when users all use the same platform for their news, social contacts and business relations, they will consult few other sources. This makes them easy to isolate and influence. Other voices or divergent ideas are therefore given less and less chance, which makes their view of the world increasingly limited by the filter bubble mentioned earlier.
Censorship from the Chinese government
Now, the Chinese government is not necessarily representative of the rest of the world, but it does illustrate the downside of such a closed platform. The government in China uses WeChat to monitor its citizens. The Chinese government also censors the content that users post themselves by watching in the background when someone posts a status update or chat message. Does he criticize or express negative comments about the political circumstances in China? Then this can cost him dearly.
Earlier this year, a change in the law was announced in China, which would mean that the president would no longer have to step down after two five-year terms. Many Chinese people did not agree with this proposal and expressed their displeasure via WeChat. These messages disappeared like snow in the sun. Searches for popular critical words suddenly yielded no results. The government managed to expand the list of popular 'banned' words, so that even the letter 'N' could not be published for a while. There have even been arrests in China based on posts on WeChat. Furthermore, there have been rumors for some hong kong telegram data time about a Black Mirror-like points system for rewarding or punishing 'good' and 'bad' citizens.
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While people like Tabor are convinced that a walled garden will become a reality, I have to admit that the idea alone terrifies me. Of course it is efficient and convenient when you can control everything from one app. But does this outweigh the privacy violation?
In addition, I wonder whether a platform like Facebook will actually go that far. To take this superpower in social media as an example: the introduction of more and more functions and possibilities, such as a dating service and recently the request for insight into financial data of users , certainly reminds us of developments such as we saw earlier with WeChat. However, the growth towards the enormous range of functions such as with WeChat will take some time.
Given the recent fuss about privacy violations and all their consequences, I think and hope that Facebook (albeit temporarily) will be more careful about collecting and securing data. If it eventually comes to the point that a party will come along that will provide you with all the comforts, I will probably choose my privacy. Princess dream or no.