It has become obvious that online services offer benefits, but also liabilities. Many of these services have generated huge profits without charging those who use the services anything. For the most part, what these services have done is to create a model that provides services to users in exchange for the personal information of the users. This information is valuable to ad services that pay the online services money to microtarget ads. The online services also sell this information to other services that find value in what they can learn about those who are active online.
This is capitalism at work, but a form of capitalism that has been accurately described as surveillance capitalism. Perhaps those who use online services find this exchange acceptable. Perhaps they do not.
Because of the combination of benefits and liabilities available in the online world, each of us must make personal decisions about the present model. Those who want something different need suggestions for how they might proceed. My personal approach is to diversify my use of online services in multiple ways. I use different services for need purposes. What I am proposing here is that users make use of multiple services for the same purposes. The goal in this form of diversification is to reduce the information shared with the most popular services and to encourage competition. I would argue that competition is valuable without even considering the personable privacy issue. Without competition, what incentive is there for the dominant players to invest in improved services for users?
Here are my suggestions for diversification. I offer an alternative to some of the most dominant players. If you are unwilling to simply switch, consider either cross-posting to bolster the amount of content on these alternatives or using comparable services for different activities again as a way to increase the popularity of alternatives.
Brave – I am a fan of Brave as an alternative to other browsers and as a way to reduce the ad dollars benefitting other social media sites. I would encourage users still to view the ads shared through Brave and to spend the reward to you to compensate the content creators and service providers you utilize. At the core of this entire situation is the use of user content to provide the incentive for others to use a given social media site. In my opinion, it is not the ads that are the problem, but the funding of the ads via the collection of personal information.
WT:social is a social sharing site that offers an alternative to both Facebook and Twitter. Encourage your friends to move with you.
DuckDuckGo – is a reasonable alternative to Google search
Pixelfed – an image sharing site that works as well as Instagram