Think about this for a moment, a day, when facebook and all of your digital footprint becomes required identification. Today, this isn’t such a far fetched idea. When entering some countries, their officials may request to review your emails, facebook accounts, and other digital profiles you may have. Let us delve further into the possibility that such a framework could be underway.
Facebook’s aim to register every individual is a daunting challenge, noble even, however fraught with unseen consequences. The repercussions are that once this goal is accomplished what will be the future roadmap for Facebook. As a system, simply providing the best way to interact with your peers isn’t the only thing it would be satisfied with in the future.
With such a trove of data on individuals from their interests to their friends, family, and social graphs, the inherent opportunities that the authority and officials can harness and insights that can be gleaned are too crucial to pass up. From terrorism risk analysis, political influence, job applications, and credit scoring models, the information available on Facebook is already playing a part in each of these areas. For one reason or another we are all being consumed, our data at least.
Data is the new might
Facebook isn’t actively seeking to be this omniscient presence in our lives, instead it is becoming this out of the altruistic, natural, and organic achievement of its aim. With so much information on individuals housed within a single place, it is only plausible that this housing will at some point become structurally important for governments and companies who need this information to predict risk or articulate a marketing demographic (both of this already takes place).
Given the brave new world we are speeding towards, the availability of data and the analytical capabilities to crunch them, and the heightened political climate around the globe, this thing that we’re so passively engaged with today, may become a necessary requirement tomorrow.
Von chucwuemeca
In our recent election in the United States, it became evident that Facebook was used to influence the election of the highest and most prominent political figure by external state actors. In the United Kingdom, a decision was made which was influenced again by the social reach of Facebook. In the world over from United States, Europe, the Philippines, and varying African nations, Facebook has been at the center of political upheavals.
The effect is provoking, and one that we haven’t seen before. The ease with which we can combine psychology and analytics with big data insights on individuals, in order to influence everything from politics, business to our own desires is new world fraught with new opportunities and catastrophes.
Facebook today is integrated into our lives, cars, exercise trackers, refrigerators, house automation, and more, making our ability to connect increasingly easy. Today we have companies utilizing our Facebook interactions in their credit scoring model, decisions on job applicants, and many other determinations. Now think about it, with as much information as we divulge on sites like Twitter and Facebook why would it not become the most essential honey pot.
You might think ‘but I have my privacy rights’, sure, although that is hardly a sufficient barrier to hold off the tsunami of interest in information that can readily influence society, additionally, its really easy to do and difficult to investigate.
How the social security system became a required part of life.
In 1934 the social security act signed into law became the first legislation designed to provide reprieve from poverty in old age, unemployment, and destitution. Along with it came the ancillary element that is the social security number.
This unique number attributed to beneficiaries of the legislation was a way of identifying the subset of the population that would receive benefits under the new legislation. From the start of it, imagining that the number would become the de-facto national identification number was a far stretch.
Today the social security number is the national identification number required to engage in all facets of our livelihood from getting a job to obtaining a library card, this single identification number has become integral to life. The transformation was gradual. Given the brave new world we are speeding towards, the availability of data and the analytical capabilities to crunch them, and the heightened political climate around the globe, this thing that we’re so passively engaged with today, may become a necessary requirement tomorrow.
How the digital social security system may occur.
Most of us are walking around with a smartphone in our pocket that signals where we are, what we are thinking about, our friends and connections, and a whole lot of other details that identifies us and others. Our smartphones in connection with our social media accounts provides a rich set of information that not only readily chronicles, but defines who we are. Facebook, the preeminent social media platform has been gradually making inroads into ubiquitous spread.
From initiatives such as internet.org to the various integrations in our everyday lives, Facebook is developing a framework that is increasing difficult to break away from. However, to repeat, Facebook doesn’t aim to be the new passport required in this brave new world, it simply is that Facebook has and is developing the framework that makes it capable of pivoting at a moment’s notice into that other thing, that Orwellian promise.
