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Hey folks,
Thanks for taking a break from your Halloween shopping, decorating, party-planning, costume-making and recipe research to read what could be a very important notice for you.
Though especially for persons involved in online promotions or networking, this post will also be of interest to anyone who engages in social media-based activities on a regular basis.
Major developments have arisen in the social media space over the past 3 weeks.
Following reports that millions of personal Google accounts have been compromised over the not so distant past, Google has announced plans to terminate its personal Google+ service at the end of August 2019.
Yes, you read that right - come Sep 1st next year, non-commercial Google+ social interactions will be no more.
The only surviving Google+ social media channels will be for businesses and (possibly) for private use by persons attached to learning institutions.
Scary, isn't it?
How many treasured posts, perfect pics and enlightening discussions do you have floating around the G+ cloud?
This invaluable content tells the story of your personal and business lives over the last several years, and in many cases is absolutely irreplaceable.
How many "bookmarks" of useful articles (that you haven't quite got around to reading) or photos of your kids and pets, favorite dishes and travel experiences do you now have to track down and file away on your desktop or tablet? Come on now, you know your phone or free Google Drive can't store all that stuff!
Hundreds? Thousands? TENS of thousands... more?
I'm sorry to scare the pulp out of your pumpkin, but unless you've been saving your G+ posts as you go (as I have), you probably won't have time to salvage them all - assuming that you can even find them.
I'm sure that Google, in its infinite foresight, has a way for you to easily find and safeguard your content. Or if they don't, they're no doubt scrambling to create one. Either way, it'll probably cost ya.
Don't feel bad, though - I haven't escaped this shocking misfortune completely unscathed. I'm way behind on my stats like overall reach, # of click-throughs, +1's, comments, shares and new followers, etc.
So I have some of my own digging to do as well, just not nearly as much as most others.
Data breaches like the infamous Cambridge Analytica scandal, this Google incident, the Yahoo! scandal a few years ago (which scared me into changing my password) and several others in the retail sector serve as poignant (and painful) reminders that nobody but YOU can be trusted blindly to protect YOUR private information, nor to protect data of sentimental or analytical value which has been created or collected by YOU.
Remember that the underlying principle of social media is the SHARING of information amongst various people, and that the platforms providing this service make money by segmenting these people into interest-based groups, aggregating data from within those groups and selling this invaluable, infinitely marketable data to the highest bidders.
It's clear to see, therefore, that safeguarding your content and personal data is in direct conflict with the profit margins of these platforms.
Accordingly, we really shouldn't entrust our data privacy to these service providers, and we definitely shouldn't put anything on their platforms that we wouldn't want all and sundry to see.
Not only can we not trust them to protect our data, we can't even trust them to tell us when it's been breached!
Google had the gall to admit that they knew about the breach since March, but opted to keep it quiet for 7 months before alerting the public!
No doubt they wanted to avoid all of the political scrutiny, bad press and high-level interrogations that Facebook suffered after the Cambridge Analytica story leaked.
Seems as if we can only count on these guys to cover their OWN butts and protect their OWN interests!
And that $647K that Facebook was fined as a result? Pl-ease! That's a mere slap on the wrist, not to mention a drop in FB's bucket.
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The long and short of it is - as the old adage says - with great power comes great responsibility.
Until these gargantuan entities, with their pandemic communities, are made to understand this fact and punished (till it hurts) when found wantingly irresponsible, our data security will continue to be at risk in this digital age and our fortunes will be determined by the integrity of those into whose hands our data lands.
But for now, don't dwell on that - have a great Halloween!
Donna
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