According to an article on Bloomberg today, Twitter sold access to the same academic who obtained millions of Facebook Inc. users’ information which was then passed to a political consulting firm without the consent of the users.
I have a few twitter accounts that i use mainly for my social media and search engine optimization (SEO) work and have to say, that Twitter tends to be a cesspool of bots talking to bots. Steemit's bot problem is non-existent compared to what's going on in Twitter and i don't think most ordinary users go there for any form of interaction.
Where Twitter excels though is getting the latest news fast. This applies not only to important news but also the trashy kind like which celebrities are feuding and what they think of the #MeToo movement. The trouble of course is that bots can control the narrative by retweeting something till it lands on trending, making it go viral.
The concern is that with your Facebook, Twitter, Reddit and other Social Media information, rogue companies can better target you with misinformation. That's where Data Warehousing comes in. One of the goals of Data warehousing is to gather multiple datasets and reconcile them in order to build a picture that's more insightful than its component parts.
If you used the same email address to register for both Twitter and Facebook, they could easily link your two accounts and analyze your messages on both platforms to build a portrait of you.
It also means that they now have a more accurate picture of you that they can use to target across multiple platforms without you even knowing it. The information you receive is targeted based on your preferences, condemning everyone to their own echo chamber. I suspect this is one of the reasons why society has become more polarized over the last decade.
Short of deleting all social media accounts, here are some easy ways to avoid being targeted by shady data miners.
Ultimately, you have to decide whether you value your privacy more than the hassle of maintaining it. Just look at Gmail. It's well known that Google processes the content of all your emails and yet people continue to use it, even for sensitive information. Boggles the mind, really.
The steps i've listed won't prevent tech companies from building a profile of you. The profile they create, though, will be so inaccurate that it's basically meaningless. There are downsides, like getting ads for services in the Netherlands even though i'm half a world away but i think it's worth it.
Stay safe, everyone. Big Brother is indeed watching.
