The Silicon Valley tech giants—megacorporations like Facebook, Apple, and Google—harvest your data and sell it to other big corporations so they can show you highly-targeted, personalized ads. This probably isn’t news to you, but it bears repeating: your attention is the product that the megacorps are selling to their advertising partners, and they’re making billions of dollars doing it.
We’ve probably all had the experience of seeing an ad online that seems to have read your mind, or listened to your offline conversations. It feels violating and invasive, but usually we carry on with our routine social media usage. Having our data harvested for profit is seen as an unfortunate cost of staying connected to your friends, family, and networks—whose data is also being harvested for profit.
What we need is a mass movement onto alternative social media platforms that don’t harvest our data, track our usage and browsing habits, or partner with predatory advertisers. Platforms that are built for users, by users.
Join us on alternative social media platforms like PeerTube and Mastodon and take control of your data! The Internet is what we make it!