The first type of surveillance is the ‘commercial surveillance’ where facebook can through its advertising system know all the preferences and moves of any active individual. Therefore, this system can be exploited by advertisers in general as they will know exactly what their clients want. For instance, most of the times, I tend to look at a make-up page for a while and then the other day all the recommended pages will be about make up. Another advantage of this surveillance goes for the government as any move conducted on Facebook is stored in the application and the government then can detect what individuals write, their preferences, their perspectives, their friends and enemies.
Another type of surveillance might be the other services that connect with Facebook and are not owned by the company. For instance, Spotify, the music application, connects with Facebook through the One graph service. This makes the Facebook generate more information about active users on both Spotify and Facebook, thus more surveillance. Also the concentration of its power is the main factor in creating more personalized pages. It is considered the most rich application after google to improve.
There is also another form of surveillance that comes from sources other than Facebook. Odeh (2018) conducted a field research on Palestinian women’s experience with gender-based violence on social media. Her results show that most of the Palestinian women report constant intervention of family members in their freedom of speech and expression. Therefore, patriarchal authority is still dominating not only in reality but also on virtual platforms which is what some females referred to as the “Surveillance Tower”.
References:
- Vaidhyanathan, S. (2018, August 18). Antisocial Media How Facebook Disconnects Us and Undermines Democracy. Indian Cultural Forum. Retrieved from: http://indianculturalforum.in/2018/08/18/anti-social-media-how-facebook-disconnects- us-and-undermines-democracy/
- Odeh, S. (November 2018). A violent network: Gender-based violence against Palestinian women in virtual space. 7amleh – The Arab Center for the Development of Social Media and the Kvinna till Kvinna Foundation. Retrieved from: https://www.apc.org/en/pubs/violent-network-gender-based-violence-against- palestinian-women-virtual-space
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