Controlling your data on Social Media

Summary

This blog covers some basic privacy actions you can take to control your data while using social media, and then goes into detail about key concepts and issues such as Third-Party sharing and Social Login, with a case study on Meta advertising.

Continuing with our theme of ‘Curating your Online Presence’, I have put together some resources to help you control your data on social media platforms.

Privacy basics

It makes sense to start with the basic considerations of privacy – look through these tips and then read on for a more comprehensive overview of different data control issues.

Have a private account unless necessary for your career to have a public one.
Turn off profile views and post views – nobody needs to know this level of detail about your internet activity (esp companies).
Turn off location sharing within apps – or restrict it so that you only share with people you trust. Give general locations on Instagram and don’t post live locations.
Don’t share personal info on a public platform.

Third-party sharing

It is good to be aware that many apps share data with third-party companies.

Third-party sharing refers to platforms sharing your data with external, third-party companies. Popular apps such as TikTok and Spotify collect and share many details about you including locations, device IDs and email addresses. To prevent apps from doing this, you can turn off your location sharing and change ad preferences.

Unfortunately, some of these apps will not allow you to opt out of sharing data entirely (eg. TikTok) but the link below contains some information on how to control your data on the platform as much as possible.

All the ways TikTok tracks you and how to stop it | WIRED

Social login

This refers to the act of creating a new account for a platform by logging into an existing account from another platform. In order for social logins to work, all of the information from the existing account is sent to a third party, who processes and authenticates it.

Although they can appear quite convenient, social logins are more risky to use compared to creating a new account for the platform. If you use Google to login into several social media accounts, and that Google account gets hacked, it becomes far easier for hackers to access your other accounts too.

For more information on the pros and cons of social logins, read the article below.

Advertising and Meta

It is always a good idea to explore the settings of a social media app, and in this section, I will tell you about my experience of systematically investigating my Instagram.

The Meta Privacy centre is a busy page, that takes you off Instagram and into a world of blogs and multifarious functions that allow you to tailor your preferences – or so I thought.

I clicked on the page ‘Ad Preferences’, as I wanted to control data used for marketing purposes. It allowed me to see recent advertisements I’d interacted with, ones I’ve seen, topics that Meta believes I am interested in and Ad Settings. On the Ad settings feature, I could learn how data influences what I see but not influence specific data that is shared about me to tailor what they can show me.

In this vein, many of the privacy settings pages were informative but had little functionality to tailor my preferences. For instance, I was allowed to determine whether Meta’s ad partners could show me relevant ads on other platforms external to Meta, but not whether they were allowed to have this data in the first place.

I also had a look around the page that detailed my information and permissions, which showed me what other companies had shared about me with Meta.

I ended up finding lots of information through my investigation – Meta knew I liked to see ‘Interior Design – Kitchen Styling’ content, told me I was on a target list for LinkedIn and Etsy advertising and had purchased recently from a florist. Nothing I did not already know, but I did feel very uncomfortable at the depth of information about engagement with companies Meta stored, and the lack of control over who else could access this.

I’ve included some quick pathways that you can use to do the same exercise.

(Instagram app > Settings > Privacy > Accounts Centre > Ad Preferences)

Follow the below to organise these:

Click Ad settings > Audience-Based advertising to remove yourself from lists that advertisers have put you on as a target.
You can choose not to get ads from ad partners (third companies who buy data from Meta).
Follow the same pathway as above and instead of clicking on Ad Preferences, click on Your Information and Permissions. Go to ‘Your activity off Meta Technologies’ and have a look at what you find. You can disconnect companies from sharing with Meta, and clear lists.