The Rise of Short Video Platforms & How Consumers Can Push Back

-- By PushkarChaubal - 23 Feb 2024

How incensed would we be if our parents, friends, or lovers divulged our deepest and most intimate secrets?

It is no secret that tech companies have been abusing our data and rendering 4th Amendment protections virtually useless. However, motivated parties, such as marketers and governments, have even more reason to rejoice. The advent of short-form video platforms have made consumers even more attached to their mobile devices. While 50-second dances seem cute and unassuming, they are Bigtech's newest, and most insidious, tool to learn our inner preferences more deeply and keep consumers glued to their platforms.

However, we do not need to fall prey to BigTech? and its parasitic tentacles. With a little foresight, we have the agency to make full use of the net on our own terms.

Short Video Platforms are the Insidious New Offspring Birthed by the Attention Economy

Increased Time Spent on the App

Short video platforms feed on our inherent urge for newness. The platforms target our reward systems by featuring 15-60 second snippets of content with bright colors, catchy music, and other eye candy. The constant flow of content creates a dopamine-driven feedback loop, making it hard to stop. The platforms are designed to be endlessly scrollable, with no “tracker” or “progress bar” to tell you how many videos the user has viewed, not unlike casinos lacking windows and clocks. The app “trains users to constantly look for new stimulation.”

Learning Intimate Details about Users

The secret sauce, however, are the platforms’ dynamic algorithms that quickly understand which content that users are most likely to engage with. In a WSJ investigation, over 100 bot accounts watched 100,000 videos on Tiktok. Within just 2 hours of “normal” use, the app had accurately learned the “personality traits” the investigators secretly assigned the bots. The study demonstrated how Tiktok learns our most hidden interests and emotions and drives users into the radicals of content making it hard to escape. The algorithm learned the bots’ vulnerabilities much faster than other platforms. One can only imagine how valuable this deep understanding of users could be to advertisers and foreign governments.

Consumers Can Take Back Control

With tech platforms harvesting vast amounts of deeply accurate personal data derived through short-form video platforms, it is natural to wonder how our data is processed. Data elements “traditionally” collected include contact information, call logs, photos, videos, and documents. However, the stakes are even higher now with Tiktok and Meta harvesting deeply intimate psychographic data. This data can be shared with commercial 3rd parties and even foreign governments.

Short video platforms that take advantage of sophisticated machine learning should be the straw the breaks the camel’s back for us all. It should be our wake-up call that we have allowed our conception of the Net to be dictated by Silicon Valley’s “best and brightest.”

Starting Simple: Web Browsing and Email

The vast majority of desktop users access the Net through a browser created by Apple or Google. Unsurprisingly, Google Chrome was built to be as advertiser-friendly in mind, allowing tracking software to follow users to the far ends of online activity. For consumers looking to dip their toes into online freedom from spies, a simple alternative is to utilize a web browser that is unfriendly to malicious governmental or commercial tracking mechanisms.A powerful way to do this is using a strong browser with AdBlock protection. I personally have been using the Brave browser on my desktop, tablet, and phone for the last 4 months, and I have been impressed with the performance and security that the browser enables. Brave, supplemented with AdBlock? , ensures that ads and trackers are kept at bay.

Email solutions include installing a GPG plugin to your current email client, or else using an email service that supports end-to-end encryption. Installing the plugin is as easy as first downloading the GPG Suite and installing a GPG plugin to your current email client using the GPG Keychain to create a new key. Once the public key is uploaded to the key server, the user is empowered to send end-to-end encrypted emails to other users with a public key. Sending encrypted messages will prevent unwanted parties, like spy agencies, from being able to access the emails.

An alternative to the GPG plugin is to use an email service provider that supports end-to-end encryption as its default. Proton Mail is one such provider. It enables end-to-end encryption between Proton Mail users. It also has built-in standard PGP encryption to send encrypted messages to people on other email providers, as long as you have their public key.

Employing the Use of a FreedomBox?

A FreedomBox is essentially a private server system that plugs into one’s internet router. This allows individuals to host their own internet services like file sharing, messengers, and micro-blogs without relying on BigTech? providers. This enables us to make use of the Net without having to worry about our data being bought and sold to marketers or governmental actors. The FreedomBox? is easy to set up and quite affordable at $60 for the hardware. Once the FreedomBox? is installed, users will have replacements for the services that BigTech had until this point made us dependent upon. Examples of services include Dropbox-like file sharing, Whatsapp-like messaging, and Twitter-like micro-blogging. The FreedomBox? is easy to set up and cleanses the users endpoint, ensuring privacy.

Conclusion

The insidious and pervasive gathering of our psychographic data by the likes of Alphabet, Bytedance, and Meta through short-video platforms should serve as a stark wake-up call to all of us. The call really is coming from inside the house.

Hope is not lost, however. Fortunately, for an immaterial expense, there are alternatives that will allow us to reap the benefits of being in the digital information age, without compromising our data. It does take intentionality to withdraw from the Parasite’s grasp, but minor changes like the use of a secure browser with Adblock, email encryption, and private server management, can pay dividends when it comes to securing our online life.

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