How much do social media know about us?

What if the dystopian future that science fiction movies, books and TV series wasn’t all that unrealistic?
What if the digital world could control our lives?

From Big Brother to Black Mirror, there are so many films, books and TV series that have dealt with these topics. Future companies controlled by digital devices where privacy and the use of personal data are always a blurred boundary. This type of textures fascinates us because, more often than not, it opens our minds to a slightly scary aspect. What if the future is really like this?

Advances in technology do not relieve these fears.
The potential of increasingly feature-rich software and apps that enter every aspect of our daily life, show us a world that is rapidly advancing towards an increasingly social-dependent society.

A few days ago the news that the Chinese government has definitively approved the entry into force of the Social Credit System (SCS) from 2020. But what is it?

The Social Credit System is a system that assigns a specific score to each citizen based on his / her “social integrity” or by verifying, for example, the payment of bills, the ability to honor stipulated contracts, personal preferences and behaviors and interpersonal relationships .
Depending on each user’s score, the government plans to impose limitations or award prizes such as shopping vouchers, subsidized loans and travel, car rental without the need for a deposit, fast check-in at luxury hotels.

Citizens with too low a score will enter a public blacklist, significantly lowering social status in correspondence with the SCS score.

The Chinese government is really determined to create its own ranking of model citizen, so much so that it has already asked eight companies for a prototype that allows the creation of an algorithm for the formulation of this score.

Any personal information monitoring system prompts us to question the privacy issue. Where is this data? Who has access to it? What are they used for?

According to a Washington Post investigation, several companies are moving to acquire personal data collected by femtech apps that are used to monitor fertility, ovulation and pregnancy. You may be wondering why, but the answer is as simple as it is shocking.

The data acquired by these apps allow an employer to understand how many employees want a child, how many are trying to have one, how many are pregnant or are in menopause.
This could lead companies to increase the costs or reduce the benefits of health coverage or, even worse, decide to terminate a working relationship.

There are limits that should be respected and to do so would require a more effective regulation of users’ private data and greater attention to the regulations that are accepted during registration.

In fact, if we talk about digital, privacy and everyday life, we cannot fail to take social media into consideration.
How far have these platforms gone into our everyday life?

We want more and more that our private becomes public and that our friends like it as much as possible, without then realizing that everything we show remains online and is saved on the database.
These data are today real gold mines for companies that want to obtain information of any kind on possible buyers.

An interesting example, of the power and at the same time of the risks of social networks, is the one expressed in the plot of the film The Circle released in April 2017.
The film focuses on one of the fundamental aspects of this digital society.

To what extent can our private life be made available to everyone on our social profiles?

It is an extremely topical question and of fundamental importance for modern society which will have to face this challenge as soon as possible to avoid serious and irreversible implications.

So let’s leave these aspects, for the moment, to remain only thrilling film plots to watch with friends … Disconnecting our profiles for a few hours.