Privacy is dead: How Twitter and Facebook are exposing you
They know who you are, what you like, and how you buy things. Researchers at MIT have matched up your Facebook (FB) likes, tweets, and social media activity with the products you buy. The results are a highly detailed and accurate profile of how much money you have, where you go to spend it and exactly who you are.
The study spanned three months and used the anonymous credit card data of 1.1 million people. After gathering the data, analysts would marry the findings to a person’s public online profile. By checking things like tweets and Facebook activity, researchers found out the anonymous person’s actual name 90% of the time.
The MIT findings raise the question of just how private our personal information is. Yahoo Finance’s Henry Blodget thinks the majority of people are okay with their information being gathered. “Most people [are fine with it], as long as it is regulated. In other words, it’s within our legal system. I think we should all be fine with it. It can be very helpful in certain ways.”
While the information may be helpful, some also see it as intrusive, especially when it’s the government collecting the data. Just this week, we learned that the government is scanning millions of license plates across the US and storing that information in a large database. Privacy experts say the government can also match your cell phone data with credit card information. Where all this data goes, who has access to it and what it is used for are all big questions that the government for the most part keeps under wraps.
Blodget says the scope and authority the government has is undeniable. “There’s no question the government has tremendous power if they come after you. Everything is stacked against you.” Blodget thinks for the most part this information is not abused adding, “A lot of people say it has prevented terrorist attacks.”
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Yahoo Finance’s Jeff Macke is on the opposite side of the privacy debate.”We’re giving away our personal liberties all over the place and we really have no check and balance system. When the government is allowed to do these types of tracking systems in secret, all of a sudden you have to figure out what secrets you’re not figuring out because there’s never one cockroach.”
As for Blodget, he says he’ll sacrifice privacy if it helps make the country safer. “I am willing to make the tradeoff of the government having the ability to look at the metadata of my phone calls or what have you, if I think it is going to make my family safer. I think a lot of Americans will say when push comes to shove it’s okay you can look at my data.”
If you’re really troubled about your privacy being invaded, Blodget has some tongue-in-cheek advice. “If you are in fact worried about it. There are cabins in the woods with no Internet access. You can grow your own food. They’ll leave you alone.”
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