In this age wherein people are more glued to their screens and using social media in their daily life, do you agree to have them be registered?
Starting this year, Arnolfo Teves a congressman from Negros proposed a bill entitled The Online and Social Media Membership Accountability Act. The concept was derived from the Sim Card Registration law that was approved recently wherein you need to provide your personal details and have them verified.
Imagine Facebook where if you sign-up, you need to give your selfie and other personal information. Or if you already have an account, to comply with the mandate, you need to submit a selfie to the said company.
Sounds interesting right?
The heart of the said bill was because there are a lot of people bashing everyone and they are anonymous. This may help in avoiding cyberbullying, harassment, etc. once passed.
I want to believe that it may help but since there's a lot of stuff going on online I am not in agreement with the said bill.
The case of rampant Fake Identification Cards.
Getting a valid ID is hard here in our country. Some will resort to acquiring one and faking the details to get one. It is illegal, but it is rare that an entity will be held in bars if caught. Probably if used in face-to-face transactions they can be caught if determined as fake but online. Nah for sure.
In some Facebook groups available, you can get one at a certain price. They will confirm that it is accepted via online transactions and even banks as they are LEGIT. I believe that these IDs created are almost the same as the government-issued ones because if these aren't then why are they still in business nowadays?
KYC Concerns and Possible Data Breach.
If you think your data is safe within the centralized community think again. On an old blog post from www.malwarebytes.com Facebook had a massive data breach impacting 500 million users and they are sued for more than $277 million for damages and who got the payment from Facebook? It was the government. Doing the math real quick around half a dollar was paid to the government by Facebook for each compromised account. Yes, that's how much their personal details are.
So what's in it for us Filipinos? A lot, since our country isn't as technologically advanced as other nations hacking and data scraping isn't that hard. The governing body doesn't have much power to such and if our data gets compromised might as well we will just cry and wait for everything to happen with our hands tied.
Btw don't you know that social media sites gather our data and sell it to advertisers?
You don't know that? Then you may have noticed that when you are talking about something a sponsored ad will pop up on your screen or probably while scrolling you will see some stuff that you had talked about.
I tried it, by sending a message to my wife talking about investment and savings. After a few minutes, advertisements about financial planning, etc are already available in my feed.
So the more we feed them our data, the more they can take some profits from us.
Forget about those long small text clauses that you click on Agree with the terms and conditions. They are all rubbish.
In a gist, the heart of the bill is good. But then again, it is not something that I can agree with. The Internet should be used freely by everyone and now that this is the age of technology, keeping our personal details is something that we need to be mindful of. It is absurd as well since we have tons of issues that we need to work on and bills to be amended online bashing and trolls aren't something that we need to take priority of.