University of Vermont researchers have published a study in the journal Nature Human Behavior revealing Facebook and Twitter among other social media platforms can learn a lot about you even without opening accounts with them. The research reveals social media can profile individual users through posts shared by their friends. The same is true when an individual is not even registered with them.
Apart from the fact that Twitter and Facebook can mine private information about an individual via their social friends, the platforms can also predict what a user is mostly likely to write next with amazing accuracy. And to drive home this point, the platforms can predict what an individual will write next with 64% accuracy; but this accuracy drops to 61% where an individual does not have social media accounts but his friends do.
The research team found that the social media platforms only need to analyze the posts created by eight of your friends to determine valuable information about you. And when you don’t have social media accounts, the platforms can still predict your behaviour with high accuracy from posts created by your friends. Your market habits, political views, religious beliefs, favourite TV shows and other personal details could all be gleaned from your friends’ social interactions.
This goes to show that users have little control over their privacy even though the platforms make them believe they could control what is gleaned about them. It boils down to the fact that these social platforms are not plainly honest about their data collection practices.
“You alone don’t control your privacy on social media platforms,” said Jim Bagrow, leader of the research team. “Your friends have a say too.”
The team was able to know this by analyzing over 30 million posts tweeted by 14,000 Twitter users.
Twitter failed to respond to requests for comments. But Facebook said users can be served ads and related content based on their social activity. However, they said they do not create profiles for non-Facebook users. Even then, many of the social media platforms give users the options to modify or delete their user data and even accounts when they desire.