If you think this is bad, you should see what your banks and financial organizations catalog for analytics.
Big Data is the new whizz-bang thing in the IT world. Your personal lives are being boiled down to numbers for multifaceted analytics on behavior, trends, creditworthiness, fraud, application use, and the list goes on.
Some of it isn’t bad, such as fraud detection, but if you think Facebook is the only game in town doing this stuff, you’re not paying attention.
The NSA has been creating maps of American citizens' social networks
Why do they want to do that?
What could social networks be used for in the hands of government? Consider:
Using Metadata to Find Paul Revere
How will such capabilities be used now?
How They Hunt
Is it already too late?...
"The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated..." US Constitution, Amendment IV.
L8r 3
Remember your Facebook profile also. People volunteer birthday, who they are married to, career, friend list, high school class, entities liked, etc.
All that can be extracted by marketing companies via a web crawler.
Sure, you can adjust privacy settings but would you trust FB?
Subterfuge is better. Change your birthday, city, middle name for example.
What colors, type and brands of clothing.
Any pets and their breed.
Body ink?
Other types of data available...
This is from Yahoo:
How we collect and use data.
We’ve updated some of the ways we collect and analyze user data in order to deliver services, content, relevant advertising and abuse protection.
This includes: analyzing content and information when you use our services (including emails, instant messages, posts, photos, attachments, and other communications), linking your activity on other sites and apps with information we have about you, and providing anonymized and/or aggregated reports to other parties regarding user trends.
This is why it’s best to precede every crime with the theft of a cell phone.