Continuing the discussion from Should We recommend some ethical social media?:
A lot of discussions about social media here at Privacy Guides have revolved around either recommending alternative platforms, or around writing guides on how to use any social media platform more privately. Usually the threads are mainly about the former idea, so I want to only focus on the latter here.
There is some sentiment that websites like Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, etc. can be used privately, and we should have guides recommending the best privacy settings on any platforms.
The most obvious counter-argument is from our own website:
Take cookie consent forms, for example. You may encounter these dozens of times per day on the various websites you visit, with a nice array of checkboxes and sliders which allow you to ācurateā your preferences to exactly fit your needs. In the end, we just hit the āI Agreeā button, because we just want to read the article or make a purchase. Nobody wants to complete a personal privacy audit on every single website they visit. This is an exercise in choice architecture, designed to make you take the easy route out instead of delving into a maze of configuration options that donāt need to exist in the first place.
Control over your privacy inside most apps is an illusion. Itās a shiny dashboard with all sorts of choices you can make about your data, but rarely the choices youāre looking for, like āonly use my data to help me.ā This type of control is meant to make you feel guilty about your choices, that you āhad the choiceā to make the apps you use more private, and you chose not to.
Privacy is something we need to have baked into the software and services we use by default, you canāt bend most apps into being private on your own.
Personally, I do not see any value in creating generic social media guides. Too many social platforms are fundamentally poor protectors of privacy, and this could create some false sense of security.
While itās true that anyone can make the educated choice to use a platform like Instagram according to their threat model, there is no model where you can make that choice and also claim to care about privacy. These are irreconcilable ideas. Therefore those models, while potentially valid for an individual(?), seem to be out of scope for what we cover on the website.
On the other hand, if we recommend alternative platforms, I do see value in pointing out the privacy settings of those platforms specifically. To give you an example, here is a proposed section of the Mastodon recommendation that covers post privacy:
My question isā¦ do we think this is the extent of what we need to cover, or should we have a knowledge base article about post privacy for other platforms? I donāt really think so TBH.