Social Media – A medium to connect and expand one’s social circle. Recent years have seen a significant rise in the no. of options one has to be socially present. It all began with Facebook; if I am not wrong and the race is still on. In this race, no matter who wins, the users will only lose. The reason I say this is because of the amount of access these companies have to a user’s data.
Let us look at the new comer in this race. Threads! Meta launched Threads on the 6th of July and one must know this that it reached over 10 million users in the first few hours of its launch. Now, a lot of people on the internet are talking about how Threads is a threat to Twitter. Well, let me first give you an idea of both the applications.
So, Twitter, was founded in 2006 and since then it had been doing pretty good until a while ago when it started changing its policies. If you have used Twitter, you would know that it allows you to write a text of certain character count which is then called a tweet. This tweet can be liked, reposted, replied to. Users can also share photos and videos as tweets. Twitter has around 450 million monthly active users.
Threads works exactly like Twitter. Here you have threads instead of tweets with character limit of 5oo characters. However, the CEO of Threads has said that they have intentionally designed Threads in such a way as to steer clear of news and politics. This means you’ll not get a lot of political masala on Threads. Well to be able to use Threads, you need to have an Instagram account. And if down the line you feel like you would probably want to get rid of this new platform, well, sorry, you cannot. You can only deactivate your account from Threads. To delete it completely you’ll have to delete your Instagram account too!
As I mentioned before, a lot of places have highlighted the possibility of Threads replacing Twitter. Looking at the current buzz around Threads, that could happen. However, we should be very mindful of registering ourselves on these platforms. Social presence is important but not as much as our privacy. By using applications like Instagram, Facebook, Whatsapp, Twitter, we are already feeding a lot of our personal data to these tech giants. Who knows how they will be using it!
If we look at both the applications in view from the perspective of privacy, Twitter seems safer than Threads. Once you log on to Threads, it will start collecting all the data Twitter collected + some add-ons. Let me list a few here –
1. Contact Info (Physical Address, Email Address, Name, Phone Number, Other User Contact Info)
2. Contacts
3. User Content (Photos or Videos, Gameplay Content, Other User Content)
4. Search History
5. Browsing History
6. Identifiers (User ID, Device ID)
7. Purchases (Purchase History)
8. Financial Info (Other Financial Info)
9. Location (Precise Location, Coarse Location)
10. Health & Fitness (Health, Fitness)
Looking above, I don’t think, I’ll be subscribing to another method of losing my personal data for free. There are a lot of alternative applications available that collect very minimal data about the user. Logically, we should be shifting to such applications. Oh, don’t worry, I’ll be covering a few here.
In my opinion, if we don’t just flow with the flow and make our social media presence decisions sagaciously, I don’t think Threads will threaten Twitter. There are better options to be explored.
Make your choices wisely.
This resonates a lot with me. I had the same concerns. We can’t trust Meta.
Zuck : “Our approach will be the same as all our other products: make the product work well first, then see if we can get it on a clear path to 1 billion people, and only then think about monetization at that point.”
Right! How would we know they aren’t selling our data?