ISTE Challenge — Your Digital Footprint
As I consider the ISTE definition of digital citizenship and the importance of understanding all of the parameters of managing your digital identity, I was excited to explore the privacy policies of leading social media companies, especially since they are all an integral part of the lives of students during their leisure time. In pursuit of understanding the data and privacy policies of leading social media, I selected to review the policies of Instagram, TikTok, and Snapchat.
When I first started to review these social media giants, I was ready to be on the defense as I assumed surely, I would find language using nuances and legalese that would be uninviting to anyone seeking to fully understand how their data is handled by these companies. However, I was very pleased with the organisation of the presentation and information on these sites. Most of the companies use clear titles or the question strategy to make finding information easy and the language was straight forward.
All three companies were very clear about their age requirements (minimum 13 years old) as well as the type of information provided when users open accounts as well as the methods utilised for storing information of their respective servers. Equally important they all used the following devices to collect information which is very visible to the user during the registration process or during normal usage practices:
· Usage information
· Content information
· Device information
· Device phonebook
While they all affirm that they share data for legal requests and do not sell your data, there are other practices that enable users to have less control over their digital footprint that should be carefully considered when evaluating the services of these social media. All three social media giants allow to varying degrees third-party services to have access to your data. Instagram affirms that they share the same system and infrastructure with other Facebook companies. This means developers creating apps across all of these companies have access to your data. It is only recently that they have stopped allowed theses developers access to the data.
All of these companies affirm that they may collect other public data provided through third party providers that you use as your signup login. This means users are provided numerous opportunities for these companies to triangulate data about their personal contacts, usage practices, and perhaps personal sensitive information without being aware of how it may impact their lives in the future.
However, the most shocking disclosure about the absence of data protection was with TikTok.
We and our service providers and business partners link your contact or subscriber information with your activity on our Platform across all your devices, using your email or other log-in or device information. Our service providers and business partners may use this information to display advertisements on our Platform and elsewhere online and across your devices tailored to your interests, preferences, and characteristics. We are not responsible for the privacy practices of these service providers and business partners, and the information practices of these service providers and business partners are not covered by this Privacy Policy.
This is an open declaration to join at your own risk. While it clearly states their business partners will use your data for advertisements, it does not state that this is the only use of your data. Reading this open declaration of proceed with caution should encourage everyone to run and review the privacy practices of all their social media.
However, to be fair all three of these social media provide clear examples about how to control some of their access to your data that impact your digital footprint, it’s up to you to take note and plan to use them.
