Your identity online and who has control over it ?
Jon Brookes
2025-02-07
headshed.dev is about owning your digital presence online
What do we mean by that ?
It means having a place, a space in cyberspace, the web, online whatever you call it, that you own and have agency over
We are building tools and apps that make that easy for you to do without a PhD in Computer Science, whilst being convenient to use and not losing control of your data. Why is this important, and why would you care about this ? Getting your stuff online is hard for most people, even today.
An ‘easy way’ to do that is to use social media, so we may think we don’t even need to have a website now
Let’s stop and think about that for a moment, is that really a good idea ?
We’re not anti social media, but it is not free and it does have a cost. When something is free online, generally, you are the product. As soon as you post to social, you give your data to someone else. This includes your photos, videos, comments, likes, even what you look at on social, forever, is gifted to the social platform.
Sometimes you will hear stories of people that have had their data being mis-used by bad actors. People often react with outrage, and rightly, but few understand that the users of social platforms that submitted posts no longer ‘own’ these posts - they gave that up as soon as they tapped on ‘submit’, and getting content removed or moderated is hard as a result of this
But that doesn’t happen all of the time and yes, that is the case for many, but what happens to your data when these bad things don’t happen ? After all, most people using social platforms have happy times. So what’s the harm and why should we care ?
Going back to the idea of ‘owning’ and ‘ownership’ or ‘agency’ - these things belong to the social platform as soon as you post to them and that data can and definitely will be sold to anyone willing to pay for it. Mostly this is used for targetted advertising but it can be for other purposes. I’ll leave that to your imagination as to the possibilities, but can you 100% trust every social platform to respect the data you gave to them ? - I don’t refer to it as ‘your data’ - by the way, its not ‘your data’ any more, even if it is a picture or video of a loved one, your child, a pet or your living room, yourself even.
Do we bury our head in the sand and cut ourselves off from social media ? No, that would be to become digital hermits or online curmudgeons that nobody would talk to or see any more. But we can choose to store what we want to be ‘ours’ on ‘our own website’ or ‘app’. But going back to what I said earlier, that is not easy, is it ?
Isn’t it easier then to just use social media - after all, “that’s what my kids are doing and they tell me that’s how to get online,so what possibly could go wrong?”. If it’s for your business or even your personal information and thoughts, all of the above can go wrong. More commonly folks lose their accounts on social due to stupid, dumb clerical errors on the part of the social platform, such as one of their ‘bots’ thinks your account is in breach of their terms and conditions when in point of fact it is not. Despite this error being something you can ‘appeal’, that process takes time and energy on your part, and is at the convenience of the social platform. Meantime your company, personal, family or project presence is gone. It can mean losing money if you’re a business. That money will be lost and you will likely have no way to recoup lost revenue, even reputational damage.
Having a place you can call yours, literally that you can own, is the only way we can wrestle this from social media services and take this back for ourselves.
Should we stop posting to social media then and stay resolutely on our own hosted platform ? That could be an option and some people do that, but there are convenient and safer options, we believe, to doing both.
That will be the subject of another missive, so for now, thanks for reading this article. If you found this of interest you may find others in this, a four part trilogy: