We are inching toward the start of a new year — and if you view this time as an opportunity to make a fresh new start, why not extend that to your tech habits? You aren’t the only one who feels like you spend way too much time on social media apps. If you feel overwhelmed by your social media consumption as of late and want to scale back, it can be a challenge to pick and choose which apps to keep and which to delete. Making that choice based on data security and privacy is one way to ensure you’re choosing wisely. Tech experts agree: this is the one social media app everyone should stop using in 2023.
It’s hard to believe we’re still mentioning the same apps in 2023, but many tech experts are in agreement: Facebook is still one of the worst apps you can download and continually use when it comes to privacy and security.
“Facebook is the most popular social media platform, and it’s been around for over a decade. It’s also one of the most highly-utilized apps on smartphones and tablets,” said Kurt Uhlir, a chief marketing officer and a globally recognized marketer, operator, and speaker. “As more and more people are using social media platforms like Facebook, the company is becoming more and more powerful — and potentially harmful to users’ privacy. The reason is: Facebook collects lots of data about how you use its app, from which pages you visit most frequently to what posts are getting the most attention from your friends. This data can be used to serve you targeted ads from third parties, which means that even if you don’t want to see those ads, they’ll still show up in your feed anyway.”
Additionally, because Facebook keeps track of everything about its users, including where they go online and what they do there, it can sell this information to companies who want access to it too. “This raises questions about whether or not Facebook has your best interests at heart when it comes to protecting your personal information,” Uhlir said.
Tech Expert Garrett Yamasaki, founder of WeLoveDoodles, reminds us about Facebook’s data breach scandals, mainly because there have been several of them in just the 18 years of existence of this social media, where they sold the data of millions of users to third-party agencies without people’s consent.
“Although Facebook remains to be one of the most popular social media in the world, security holes are being found on a regular basis on this platform, even today,” Yamasaki. “Even if you’re careful enough not to share any financial or other sensitive information so a possible data breach doesn’t ‘affect you,’ the simple fact that the wrong person gains access to your private conversations and posts (which is something Facebook hackers don’t have much of a problem with) can end up in harmful consequences.”
Several social media platforms can pose security risks, but Facebook is the OG when it comes to privacy and data breaches — and that makes it a good one to delete at the start of this new year.
