Social media companies under fire for spying allegations

​​​​​​​ISTANBUL

The world’s largest media platforms are accused of allegedly spying on users with data leaks and privacy concerns coming to the fore, concerning billions of people.

The global spread and the widespread adoption of digital technologies led many tech companies, primarily US- and China-based, to be the ones with the highest-ranking brand values.

The increase in the amount of data tech companies hold has brought the topic of privacy to the forefront when discussing the rise of social media platforms.

Google and Meta have been at the center of debates, as the former is alleged to have been listening to its users via its voice assistant without knowledge or consent, and consequently, using collected data to tailor advertising to users.

Google Assistant has been alleged to record ambient sounds and share private conversations with advertisers, for which Google agreed to pay $68 million to settle a lawsuit to avoid litigation, according to a recent report.

Meta, boasting billions of users worldwide, is alleged to have been storing and analyzing WhatsApp messages by a multinational group. A lawsuit alleged that the end-to-end encryption in WhatsApp is a façade, claiming that user privacy has been violated.

But these recent developments are nothing new. The spying and the violations of privacy by tech companies can be traced back a long time ago.

Many firms, especially US-based social media platforms, have been in the limelight since their inception due to many allegations, the most prominent of which was by CIA employee Edward Snowden.

Snowden revealed some classified documents that showed Washington had established a mass surveillance system, monitoring not only what it deems suspects but the entire world.

The documents showed that the National Security Agency (NSA) had direct access to the servers of companies like Google, Apple, Facebook, Microsoft, and Yahoo, which is how it monitored emails, chat histories and files.

In 2018, one of the massive social media scandals came to the fore.

The Cambridge Analytica scandal was what experts categorize as an example of psychological warfare. The UK-based political consultancy company had obtained all the data related to 87 million people through a personality test called “This Is Your Digital Life.”

The simple questionnaire on Facebook collected a massive data set to create psychological profiles for each user. The company was then found to have manipulated the users it collected data on to influence the Brexit vote and the 2016 US elections.

Cambridge Analytica was shut down and Facebook was fined $5 billion, the highest privacy violation fine ever imposed on a tech firm.

In a more recent example, after billionaire Elon Musk bought the US-based social media platform Twitter, now X, he released what has come to be known as the Twitter Files.

The Twitter Files were the internal company correspondence and documents sent to independent journalists, which revealed the secret agreements between Twitter and the US government.

The leak showed that Twitter at the time used a system called visibility filtering to restrict accounts contradicting Washington’s official narrative without users knowing. The accounts were not completely shut down but algorithmically altered to make their posts appear less in front of others.