Social Networking, "How much is too much'. Draw an inference based on your circle of friends. Write a
gist of your finding in not more than 350 words.
Answers
Some people might think that online privacy is, well, a private matter. If you don’t want personal information getting out online, then you can just not put it out there. Right? Wrong. Keeping your information private isn’t solely your choice anymore. Friends can play a big role in your privacy, new data show. And the more they share on a social network, the more that social network can figure out about you.
Someone who joins a social network — such as Snapchat, Instagram or Facebook —wants to find their friends. Often, the social network can help. Many apps offer to import contact lists from your phone or e-mail. These apps then use that information to find matches with people already in the network, and suggest them to you.
It’s very convenient. And sharing those contact lists seems harmless, notes David Garcia. He studies how people interact with social networks at the Complexity Science Hub Vienna, in Austria. “People giving contact lists, they’re not doing anything wrong,” he says. “You are their friend. You gave them the e-mail address and phone number.” Most times, you probably want to stay in touch with this person. You might even want to Snapchat them or see their Instagram pics.
But once that person shares a contact list with the social network, some information on everyone in that list is now being shared around. Even if someone on that contact list — you — didn’t want that information shared.
A social network can now use that information to create something called a shadow profile. This is a set of predictions about you. It’s based on all of that information from other people. The concept of a shadow profile first came to light with a Facebook bug in 2013. That bug shared the e-mail addresses and phone numbers of some 6 million users with all of their friends. Unfortunately, that information wasn’t supposed to go public. Oops.
Facebook fixed the bug. But it was too late.
Some users noticed that the phone numbers on their Facebook profiles had been filled in. But the users had never given Facebook their phone numbers, and had never put them on their profiles. The social network merely filled in the missing information for them. Facebook had collected those numbers from the contact lists innocently provided by a user’s friends.
A shadow profile had become reality.
It’s creepy. It is not, however, surprising that a social platform could take names, e-mail addresses and phone numbers and match them with users already on the network. But Garcia wondered if social networks would also be able to build shadow profiles of people who had never been on the network at all.
Internet archaeology
To find out, he turned to a now-defunct social network called Friendster. Launched in 2002, it was a social-networking site that preceded Facebook. In 2008, the social site boasted more than 115 million users. But the next year, people began jumping ship for other sites. By 2015, Friendster had shut down. Millions of abandoned public profiles vanished.
Or did they?
The Internet Archive is a nonprofit online library. It keeps records of more than 200 billion web pages. Web pages like Friendster. Garcia was able to use this site to retrieve data on 100 million public accounts from Friendster
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