Thursday January 25th, 2024
Due to an early morning for my 4:30 am shift at Starbucks, I did not start my day with my phone. While getting up early sucks in the moment, it allows me to be more productive throughout my day, while also eliminating the use of my phone first thing in the morning. I did not go on my phone until my 10 minute break at 7 am, which is when I scrolled through my rotation of social media apps, but most of my time was spent on Instagram.
While I did not post anything, Instagram was still able to collect all sorts of data through my scrolling. How you use Instagram determines what data is collected, including your search queries, the content that you view or engage with, and the frequency and duration of your activities. Additionally, the advertisements you interact with on Instagram provide valuable information about your interests and preferences. Instagram uses this data collected to provide you with personalized experiences. It also uses it to improve its services and to target ads more effectively. This is all stated directly on the app in the Data Policy, to inform users of what goes on behind the scenes to provide the user with “comfort” and “safety.”
At 9:15 am, I got off work and headed home. I played some music in my car on my way back. As Taylor Swift fans would say, I am in my “Lover” era.
Once I got home, I took my dog for a quick walk and listened to some more music. On my walk I listened to even more Taylor Swift.
I got back from my walk at around 10:15 am, and then continued to listen to music while I got out of my work clothes and ready for the day. I had a hair appointment at 11:15 am that I was getting ready for. On my way to the appointment, I listened to one of my Spotify mixes curated just for me and my music taste.
Because most of my media consumption is on Spotify, I dug a bit into how they curate these personalized playlists which often listen to. I found that Spotify uses Personalization Algorithms to create playlists such as “Discover Weekly”, “Daily Mix”, and “Your Time Capsule.” These algorithms analyze and identify songs that are often listened to together based on similarities between tracks. As a result, Spotify can create a personalized list of songs for each user based on their listening history and relationships across songs. “As listeners engage with the playlist, their actions such as listening, skipping, or saving to their library help train our recommendation engine about how best to use the tracks in our music library” (Barthle 2023).
I got back home at 1 pm and sent my long-distance friend a little vlog on Snapchat. Honestly, I don’t use Snapchat much because I’m not fond of the format of communicating, but it’s great for keeping in touch with distant friends.
After that, I finally sat down to work on some homework. I worked on sites including Canvas, GoogleDocs, and Google’s search engine. To keep me focused, I listened to my movie scores playlist on Spotify. I took a quick break at 3 pm and checked my social media apps again for about 15 minutes, then I went back to work.
From 5:30 pm up until I got in bed, I did not engage with that much media because my Bible study meets at 6:30, after I eat dinner. Before I went to bed at 9:30 pm, I checked my social media apps once more. This time I did not scroll through TikTok because I deleted it exactly for this purpose.
On this day, I did not engage with that much media. Most of my media usage came from Spotify and Instagram. Upon downloading the apps, I acknowledged and agreed to the privacy policies without reading them, and even after learning about data privacy on social media, I still feel it’s too late to start over. I am too deep into most social media apps, there is nothing left for me to protect.
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