A new study shows that social media privacy is comparable to secondhand smoke. It is controlled by the people around you. Individual choices have long been considered a basic tenet of online privacy. If you don't want to be on Facebook, you can either leave it or not sign up in the first place. Then your behavior will be your own private, right? The new study presents strong evidence that the answer to that question is no.
The team of scientists collected more than thirty million public posts on Twitter from 13,905 users. Using this data, they showed that information in the Twitter posts of 8 or 9 of a person's contacts makes it possible to predict that person's subsequent tweets as accurately as if they were looking directly at that person's own Twitter feed. /P>
The new study also shows that if a person leaves — or never joined — a social media platform their friends' online messages and words still provide about 95% of the "potential predictive accuracy," the scientists write, about the future of a person's activities – even without that person's data.
Looked at from the other side, when you sign up for Facebook or any other social media platform, "you think you're giving up your information, but you're also giving up your friends' information!" says the mathematician who led the new study.
The research raises profound questions about the fundamental nature of privacy – and how, in a highly networked society, one's choices and identity are embedded in that network. The new study shows that, at least in theory, a company, government or other actor can accurately profile a person — think political party, favorite products, religious commitments — from their friends, even if they've never been on social media or deleted them. their account.
In the new study, the scientists used their analysis of Twitter writings to show that there is a mathematical upper limit to how much predictive information a social network can hold — but that it matters little whether the person is profiled, or whose behavior is predicted, is on or off that network when their friends are on the network.
“You just can't control your privacy on social media platforms,” says the researcher, “Your friends have a voice, too.”
