The latest scandals related to the leakage of personal data of Facebook users have alerted many users. More and more users began to think about how social networks use their personal data and to whom they are transferred. In an investigation by the British edition of The Guardian, Cambridge Analytica contacted Alexander Kogan, professor of psychology at the University of Cambridge in the UK, who also teaches at St. Petersburg State University, in 2014. Especially for Cambridge Analytica, Kogan created an application with a psychological test, for the passage of which users were offered a reward. The application requested access to users' Facebook profiles and their friends lists. So, despite the fact that only 270,000 people passed the test, the application had access to 50 million profiles. The collected data, according to Kogan, were used solely for academic purposes, but the resulting database was transferred to Cambridge Analytica. Shortly after the publication of the investigations, the #DeleteFacebook social campaign was also launched on the network, urging users to delete their Facebook accounts. Two hours after launch, the hashtag hit the top with over 10,000 unique mentions on Twitter.

Facebook's innovative approach to collecting information has made the social network an extremely convenient platform for businesses interested in marketing, advertising and promoting their products. So, Facebook users voluntarily provide information about their birthdays, places of residence, families, employment and interests, reinforcing this data with personal photos, messages and statuses. Moreover, the platform also collects and stores information about preferences, messages and calls, lists of friends, family and colleagues, search history, and knows exactly which media users read, which places they visit most often, and from which devices they access the social network.
Not only Facebook is engaged in the collection of information, all, absolutely all social networks that exist today collect and store users' personal data. What kind of data this is and why it is collected can be found in the user agreement. We accept it when registering on the social network.

To summarize, they collect and analyze the following data:
Registration - we disclose them when we create an account: first name, last name, gender, age, place of residence, phone number, email, and so on. What we tell about ourselves: profession, marital status, interests. As well as all changes in the profile: change of job, city, marital status.
Our online activities: photos we post (as well as captions and where they were taken), posts, likes, hashtags, shares, comments, videos watched, other profiles viewed, content we have read or removed from tapes, messages. Information about where we click, what we buy, what links we follow, how much time we spend in the window with the social network tab, how often.
Subscriptions to communities and the history of subscriptions, your publications in them.
List of friends and subscriptions, the history of their addition. Outgoing and incoming contacts, including those from other social networks.
Login device information: operating system, phone model, browser, IP address, installed applications, battery level. Mouse movements and signals from the camera built into the Facebook application are also analyzed.
Network and communication: mobile operator and provider, language, time zone, phone number, connection speed, nearest Wi-Fi access points.
Names and types of files on the device, names of programs and applications, contacts from the address book.
Cookies, data about the user from third-party resources and collected by partners. Such partners can be, for example, Internet payment services, online stores. For example, in order to work more effectively with Facebook ads, the site owner installs a "pixel" - a code that records which pages the user has viewed, how much time he spent on the site, what he bought, and so on.
Geodata (our location and movements).
What other people say about us when they tag us in a photo, share a post or repost ours, mention us in messages.
Every day we write something, post it and search on the Internet, and all these actions become a “digital footprint”. It contains data of various types: texts, video and audio recordings, pictures, geolocation, metadata, history of site visits and requests, purchases, and much more. What is in the network will remain in it.

Most of the data received from social networks (text, pictures, voice and video) is not structured in any way, therefore it is useless on its own. To benefit, they work with data: information is processed, analyzed, compared, and predictions are made on its basis. At the output, clear models and patterns are obtained: how users of different ages, nationalities, social status behave, what they pay attention to and how they interact with content.
For example, with the help of big data, Netflix analyzes the behavior of customers: what films and series they watch, which ones they stop watching, what they review, what ratings they give. Based on these data, the expectations of the audience are determined, and it is predicted whether the released film or show will be in demand. This helped Netflix create a new product - one of the most watched series House of Cards. Big data is used in various fields: medicine, education, HR, finance, industry. And also in marketing: the algorithm predicts our interests and tries to adjust advertising as accurately as possible in order to offer products and services not to everyone in a row, but only to the target audience.

So, if you indicate your passion for drawing in your profile, an advertisement for art supplies will come. Post a photo against the background of your car - they will show an advertisement for a car service. According to the texts that the user writes on the page, according to photos, likes, communities, one can determine the psychotype, political views, and the like. And then recommend new bands, friends, music, suggest who can be tagged in the photo.
Despite the fact that the very idea of ​​​​creating social networks is quite good, it consisted in isolating a person in every possible way from loneliness, surrounding him with the care and attention of virtual friends and relatives who are at a great distance and getting to know others, there are negative sides and they are very significant.
privacy concerns
hacking and password cracking
virtual twins
manipulation of our minds

And no matter how many minuses we find, the future is behind social networks because technical progress does not stand still. In this connection, many experts and developers see decentralization as a solution to the following problems:
First, the blockchain platform gives users full control over who uses their personal data and how.
Secondly, unlike centralized networks, where a huge amount of information is protected by a single system, distributed registry technology stores copies of the network on the devices of all users, which means that it is almost impossible to hack such a network.
One of the decentralized social network projects is Solcial, which allows using the network without fear of censorship, which is completely independent from both the state and the company managing the project.

Content storage is implemented on IPFS, access to it occurs through a peer-2-peer (p2p) layer. In simple words, this is a torrent tracker where nodes share files with each other that they store on their disk and then share these files with other nodes, distributing them over the network and creating a set of n nodes. Each of these nodes stores files, which allows them to be accessed regardless of censorship and will be available even if someone disconnects. Accordingly, no one except the user himself will be able to manage his content, will not be able to make changes, delete or use confidential information. Why? The blockchain chain, if in simple words, can be represented as a book with the ability to add pages. Each new page is written online, and the rest cannot be edited or deleted. Therefore, everything posted will remain in Solcial forever.

Advantages of Solcial compared to centralized social networks:
1. There is no central authority that decides what is censored or allowed. This is the community that manages and manages the social network through its DAO and foundation. Any holder of the SLCL token can vote on the network for the future decisions of the social network.
2. Some type of content is not a free speech issue and is illegal (such as child porn, Nazi posts or terrorism) and will be moderated by the community.
3. Everything is encrypted in Solcial, without any backdoors reading your private messages. You can create an anonymous account and use it however you like.
4. If you are a content creator, you can now accumulate cryptocurrencies and increase your actual market capitalization. Anyone can join Solcial and monetize whatever they want.
What I would like to say in conclusion - social networks are fun! Like at a big and noisy party, but always in a comfortable chair in front of the computer. You can get acquainted, communicate, study, play, while no one will even know if you are a real person, except for your loved ones, of course. In fact, this problem is very relevant today precisely because of scammers, hackers and criminals. Therefore, as a conclusion, we can conclude the following - social networks are an amazing place that allows you to get to know people and communicate with friends. If used wisely, social networks can do a good job and bring new emotions to life. But they will never replace the real world with all its colors and wonders. Remember this, and I wish you good luck!

@solcialofficial #solcial #nocensorship $slcl #scout #solana #socialnetwork #privacy #freedom #decentralized #web3

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