Social media profiles are used to send targeted ads. What else can be done to us users with this data and how dangerous can it get?

Question

Many people advocate for concealing your data as much as possible on social media. Hackers and data mining companies can create a virtual you based on your usage of social media. What else can our social media data be used for?

In: Technology

Answer 1

In summer 1940 the Nazis took over Amsterdam and gained access to the population registers. Unfortunately the Netherlands had written down the religious affiliation of their people which basically gave the Nazis all the addresses of jewish people in the country.

Now think of all the information a clever algorithm or a neural network can distill about you as a person from every post made and every like you gave or every product you bought.

With GPS and bluetooth being a thing we theoretically have a dense grid of relative position data of every smartphone in the world. It’s no harm done when McDonalds expects you to buy a BigMac in the next 15 minutes with a certainty of 85% and begins production. But it’s definetely harm done when a hostile power has access to that information and blackmails some engineer of the JPL and pushes him to sabotage a part of a rocket engine etc.