As you may have noticed, two of the biggest social media channels and one of the top messaging services had a major outage a couple of weeks ago. This is just one of the many outages that have occurred this year alone, affecting hundreds of thousands of users. What users noticed from the latest outage has really made them think about how the platforms owned by Facebook track and use their personal data.
As you may have noticed, one of the major issues on these Social Media sites was the lack of images. Facebook and Instagram presented the images to the users as broken files with a description of what the image contained. For many this was standard captions such as, “people smiling”, “Image may contain: Dogs” etc., some were a little more specific, which is expected when a site is experiencing problems. We all know that Alt Text is important for SEO purposes but it makes you wonder how the corporation uses this information and what they gain from knowing what each user posts.
What we do wonder, especially with the past data protection breaches that the company has had, is how these images are being defined, what system they are using and whether they store this data for any specific purposes. It has made users question if Facebook and the other platforms are using this data to once again fuel their ads and target consumers.
So, what do you think? We’d love to hear your thoughts!
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