This is Who’s Buying Your Social Media Data

By Chandra Steele

PC Mag UK

When you share something on social media, you might have a bigger audience than you think.

There’s a general rule that if you’re not paying for something, you’re the product. Social networking sites and messenger services are free and very profitable (Facebook makes $86 billion a year in ad revenue), and it’s your data that’s for sale.

ClearVPN looked at who’s watching what you post: It analyzed the policies of social networking sites and messenger services regarding data collection, storing, and sharing.

That valuable personal data includes your phone number, email address, contacts, location, health data, payment info, chat content, search history, media stored on your phone, device ID, and user ID. All of these things can be sent to advertisers, ad-affiliated sites, law enforcement, researchers, data-measurement companies, and vendors.

While the data is often said to be anonymized, it does not take much to get a very clear picture of a single person from an accumulation of this data. Aside from privacy issues, the dispersion of data in so many locations leaves people open to data breaches that can result in fraud and identity theft.

More alarming are the social and political implications of targeting users with false information. Misinformation spreads quickly on social media, and the right mix of data makes it easy to find those who might be the most open to manipulation.

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Via https://uk.pcmag.com/news/134370/this-is-whos-buying-your-social-media-data