"Okay...why should I care at all? I've gotten this far without knowing how it works."

So here's the thing: over the decades, corporations have figured out that they can weaponize this lack of knowledge for their benefit. I'm going to use social media as the example here and I'm going to relate all of the "technical" terms to something everyone understands: ordering at a restaurant.

"How are corporations using it to their benefit?"

Take Facebook for example. Facebook created a platform where people can share anything about their lives with each other. The other thing they did was a technological decision: they are going to store everything on their own servers that they control. Every piece of account information was given to Facebook and, as time went on, that information got increasingly more personal. When it became time for Facebook to make money to sustainably cover their server/personnel costs (as well as...other things that CEOs spend money on), they did the obvious: selling ad space on the site.

Tech Lesson: Client/Server Architecture

What you think of as "apps" on your phone are only one piece of the puzzle. These apps are referred to as 'clients' which means they send and receive data to servers. It's kind of like going to a restaurant: you (the client) ask your server (in this case literally) for things and they go bring them to you.

The brains of Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, iMessage, etc. all lives on servers in a datacenter. Also known these days as "The Cloud". This concept of having an application run on servers and a client to access it is called "client/server architecture". Your phone is the client that asks for the posts, their cloud is the server that gets them out of the database for you.

How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying

After some time, things started to take a turn for Facebook. Showing ads on the site is an easy solution because, the more people who use the website/app, the more it costs to run the servers and store the data and, at the same time, the more people who use the app, the more ad revenue they make. But covering server costs isn't the only thing they want to do with money. They need to grow and constantly keep making more money for investors.

The way they do that isn't necessarily by showing more ads, people get tired of that after a while. This means they have two options: subscriptions or more charging more for ads. Subscriptions get in the way of people using the service and they get in the way of people giving Facebook their data, but how do they make the ads worth more? Well, they have an entire database of the lives and connections people have made and shown on Facebook.

"Okay, that's cool and all, but what Is 'my data'? That's pretty vague."

Increasingly targeted ads use increasingly more data so Facebook adds more features: groups, messenger, marketplace, dating, forums, and everything under the sun. Facebook created these spaces so that people would give them more and more information about who they are. Every post, every like, every share, every relationship status change, every photo, every message in a group chat is on Facebook's servers.

So you have to think about it this way: your friendships, your connections, your hobbies, your interests, your likes, your dislikes, what you create, and what you consume is all data stored and owned by Facebook. Social media, either through Facebook, Instagram, or WhatsApp (yes, they're all social media) is a reflection of your personality. And Facebook owns it all.

"What do you mean 'Facebook owns it'? Don't I own it?"

Nope. You Don't. The servers are theirs, the databases are theirs, the apps are theirs, and you gave them all of the information and you cannot get it back from them. They can—and do—use it for (almost) whatever they want and deleting the content doesn't always "delete the content".

Tech Lesson: Databases and Soft Deletion

The way most databases operate is with a concept called "soft deletion". When you mark something as deleted in the app, it's basically just marking a checkbox on a spreadsheet that says "don't show this to people anymore". The actual post content is still in the database, like the rest of the row is till in the spreadsheet, there's just a piece of code that says "don't show it" that they choose to respect. Unless they need to use it to sell ads. In that case, it's still in that database and they'll use it for whatever they want.