What do People Know About Me?

In the swirling maelstrom that is the Cambridge Analytica-Facebook dibacle it is worth us all asking this question. What do people know about me? There are different sides to us all, the side we show our friends and family and the one we share with our colleagues and classmates - the public and private.

This is nothing new, social scientists and psychologists have been discussing the blurring lines between our public and private lives since the 1980s if not earlier. Ask people who are in their 30s and they may be more aware of the difference between their public and private lives, they might even talk about the 'right to privacy' but most people under 30 rarely have that expectation (or if they do it is in areas of their lives where older people do not expect it).

What is your expectation of privacy? We talk about privacy more in terms of our 'settings' on social media apps or websites than we do in terms of our private lives away from the public view. Is this because we know the information about us can be harmful to how others see us? Or is it that we do care about who has access to our most personal connections and information. Some argue that it is more we are living in an age of public lies and private truths.

The heart of the deception many enter into is that you present yourself in one way in your public role, but feel or behave a different way, in private. Life in your parallel universes often grows gradually, as you adapt to and embrace behavior that you see rewarded, even as it clashes with your own values or beliefs. Over time, that generates increasing discomfort, especially if whom you’re morphing into publically doesn’t mesh so well with the person you are inside.

 Choices that we make, if we believe sociologists and social scientists, push us into one tribe or another. The labels given to these groups, or created by them, change over time. No longer are people divided between their love of Oasis or Blur or Nike or Adidas, instead our divisions are shifting into things far darker in the age of growing awareness of populism.

This is why the tapping into the information of nearly 50,000,000 Facebook users is shocking to most but dangerous to others. That those private truths have been, allegedly, exploited to sway elections and referenda is far more worrying. We believe in free choice, agency to do what we see as the right thing to do. If our free choice has been manipulated by a corporation, on behalf of a client, to rig the outcome then we have been duped and nobody likes to play the fool.

What all of this means for the voters in America and the voters in Britain, because Cambridge Analytica worked on to support Brexit, remains to be seen. What it means for me is that I will be seriously looking at what social media I really want to be keeping and I am not the only one.

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