“Mabuti na lang at wala akong ganyan” [Good thing I don’t have that].

This was a line I heard probably around 2 weeks ago from a friend that references “that” to Facebook upon seeing the news on the emergence of impostor accounts on such platform after just a weekend. I told my friend though that there is no escape (from the surveillance platform) if friends or family members also upload photos of people that are not even on the platform because of its facial recognition algorithm. Always remember that it is very imperative for people who took photos (or videos) of others as a habit to ask people for consent before even uploading it online, most especially if those concern kids.

As far as I can remember, there was no concrete evidence that Facebook had a glitch, contrary to an article - NBI: Facebook copycat accounts may be due to ‘glitch’, saying that it is not impossible. Of course it would have been better if the person that had stated this came from or works for Facebook, right? A glitch or not, identity theft has been happening already for decades. Technology, especially social media, has made it just a lot easier for thieves to harvest the data. And where can they easily get data? Facebook, of course! Data is like water or oil, it leaks.

In the Philippines, more than 40M users are subscribed to the platform. This was also made possible through partnerships with telcos by offering free access to the platform. A week ago, a documentary about a journalist, freedom of the press, and social media disinformation was released. Though the video mentioned about how Facebook was greatly leveraged for political campaigns through behavioral manipulation, I find it ironic that those who had watched the film and defend democracy and free speech still went on and continue using the platform.

Another suggestion that came out to get rid of impostor accounts was to perform a KYC on Facebook which would mean giving even more data to the platform. No, this will be very problematic in the future, assuming that the future still has democracy left.

Satisfyingly, for the past 2 weeks, I noticed that more medical doctors are starting to move out of their Facebook pages or accounts and some had even deleted entirely their accounts after downloading their data out of the platform. I greatly commended them then for taking the big leap towards protecting their patients’ privacy and at the same time defending democracy as well.