Is it my search history? My Instagram pictures? If so what exactly is useful about this to the people they sell to? I was thinking they might sell to scammers but idk
In: Technology
It is all of your activity. Let’s take Instagram as an example.
Instagram tracks a lot of behaviour you might not realize. How long you watch certain videos. How long it takes you to get bored. What sort of faces you watch for longer. What posts you like or comment on or repost. How often you make posts. Who you follow.
Instagram has computer programs to track all of these types of behaviours in order to build a picture of you so that they can give you more of the content you like (this is what people are talking about when they talk about ‘the algorithm’, many websites do this). For instance, they might notice that you watch a lot of nature videos. So, they show you some cute animal videos too, to see if you enjoy those. You liked those videos, you watched them or reposted them, etc! So they now know that you like animals. If you like animals, then maybe you have a pet! Now, they can sell that information to someone like Purina Pet Food, who can use it to target ads to you to try and get you to buy their brand of pet food.
All of this is on top of whatever information they can glean from the things you actually post. If you make lots of posts about places you would like to travel, they can sell that information to a travel agency who will send you coupons for flights or hotels.
Everything you do can be recorded and used to figure out details about you, which can be valuable to a business trying to sell you something.
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