Though I have always been mindful about what I post on the Internet, I have become increasingly aware that it is not only the personal data we post about ourselves that should concern us. As was well highlighted in the docu-drama film, The Social Dilemma, by some of the designers responsible for the systems in place now, the data we share is only part of the problem. The likes of Facebook, YouTube, and others are placing data in front of our eyes, calling it ‘Personalisation’.

At some point, the usefulness of being shown what we most want to see became companies putting in front of us what they and other interested parties desire for us to think, want, and see. This kind of psychological manipulation leads to our very attention on sale and purchasable by the highest bidder. Such a powerful thing can involve anything from product placement to even the swaying of elections. Three years on from Cambridge Analytica, it is still happening. (By the way, Cambridge Analytica was operating as a shell company for the private British behavioural research and political PR company, SCL Group, which used data mining and data analysis.)

Facebook stores your biometric facial data (facial recognition material), your activity on other sites and apps and continuously tracks this, along with your politics and spending habits. Facebook also allows other companies to ‘scrape’ information from their users. Clearview AI, for example, sources their photos for their facial recognition software from Facebook. Incidentally, Clearview AI had a data breach last year. As most of us should by now know, gone is never completely gone – the pictures remained on the Clearview AI database even after users delete them from their social media accounts.

A plethora of privacy and security issues, daily ransomware attacks putting sensitive data at risk of being published led to a decision. In February this year, I decided to de-Facebook and de-Google my life. I will admit that, as with any (I will call it what it is) addiction, it was a little hard to withdraw. Everyone handles social media detox differently, and I realised the best way for me would be to carry it out in stages.

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