My sister is so convinced our phones are listening that she will censor what she says when she’s near hers so as not to alter the content she sees on TikTok. I’ll ask her, for example, if she’s seen the election coverage from the Washington Post account on her feed, and she will pick up her phone and dictate her preferences into the microphone in case TikTok is listening: “Harry Styles, MCAT, Pre-med. No Washington Post. Harry Styles, MCAT, Pre-med.” She is fully convinced this ritual has an effect on what type of content will appear on her algorithmically curated feed. 

While there is no conclusive evidence that our technology is listening in on our conversations to help tech giants deliver personalized content, it is true that TikTok and other social media platforms collect massive amounts of information about their users in order to populate our feeds. Everything you do online, on your phone, in almost any digital capacity produces data. That data is then used to inform the algorithms that are responsible for targeted ads as well as placing the content you see on your newsfeeds, timelines, and search results.

The problems that have materialized from this practice have become a topic of increasing public concern in recent years. From the spread of misinformation and polarization over social media feeds, to security breaches, to the near banning of TikTok in the US, data is at the center of national discourse about privacy, truth, and power. Technology ethics advocate and founder of the Center for Humane Technology Tristan Harris likens the unchecked power and influence of the companies collecting our data to a threat on par with climate change 1.

 

I find it difficult to wrap my mind around the scale and severity of these problems while liking photos of my friend’s new puppy on Instagram. 

For all the media coverage and conversations about data and algorithmic recommendations and a need for transparency, most people, myself included, don’t know what our data literally looks like or how we are understood by these platforms through our data. We only see the outcomes. 

The EU’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) law, which requires a certain level of transparency from any organization that collects data from people in the EU, has spurred platforms to provide information about how they’re using our data 2. Companies often make those features available to American users as well. For example, when I saw an ad on Facebook for sweatshirts adorned with the likeness of Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg alongside the words “Notorious RBG,” I had the option to click “Why am I seeing this ad?” The explanation provided was that the advertiser wanted to reach people that “Facebook thinks are interested in Shopping and fashion and Hoodie,” as well as females ages 18 to 30 whose primary location is the United States. The explanation is also accompanied by a disclaimer that “there could be more factors not listed here.”