Facebook and Big Data: Are you safe in Facebook?
Written By: Eileen Hew
Have you ever faced an
odd situation where the last moment you searched for a hairdryer on Lazada.com,
a variety of similar hair dryer ads appear on your Facebook timeline at the
very next moment? First you may think that maybe it’s just a coincidence, but
as such “coincidence” started to increases, it is time for you to figure out
deeper how Facebook “make use” of your data.
As we enter the era of
Big Data, giants companies such as Google, Facebook, Amazon and Microsoft were
making full use of the big data in order to drive their business performances
(Marr, 2015). Question is, how does this whole data-selling thing work?
1.
Tracking Cookies
Despite constant reminder of turning off your websites’ Cookies, a
lot of internet users are still not well-aware of it or maybe don't see it
as an issue. However, with Cookies, Facebook is able to track their users
across the webs. As an example, when your are scrolling through your Facebook
home page and suddenly feel like shopping in Uniqlo online website, this is the
time where Facebook can track the site that you are visiting. The next thing
you’ll certainly see from Facebook will be ads from Uniqlo.
2.
Facial Recognition
With it’s proud facial recognition feature, Facebook can actually track
its users across the web just by their self portrait or pictures posted on the
internet, indicating that your personal data is just at their fingertips.
3.
Analyzing the “likes”
What interest companies’ advertisers the most is always the
preference of consumers. What’s more easy than obtaining these datas from
Facebook? By just analyzing the “likes” of Facebook users, advertisers will not
only know the age group, gender, relationship status of their targeted
customer, they can also know something as deep as political views, psychological
state, and also the lifestyle pattern of these people.
Therefore, before you check in to some café that
you are hanging out with your best friends, before you share posts similar to your
point of view, or even before you post a photo, think twice. But again, if all the above mentioned seems okay to
you, why not?
Reference
Marr, B. (2015). Big data case study collection. Retrieved from https://www.bernardmarr.com/img/bigdata-case-studybook_final.pdf
Monnappa, A. (2017). How Facebook is using big data - The good, the bad, and the ugly. Retrieved from https://www.simplilearn.com/how-facebook-is-using-big-data-article
Nice sharinh eileen .for me yaa..virtual life are not safe as we know and ya everything is okay when we feel okay to share. Hence, people are not truely think that it hazard until their account will be hacked or others bad thing. Once they have an experienced on it then they will be careful in order to share their personal data.
ReplyDeleteI agree that the technology that we have in this era has made our life easier but everything came with a price. Price of humanity i could say. The technology has made us more lazy than ever.
ReplyDeletein my opinion, with the digital.era, personal privacy are easier to been abuse by to apps developer, like facebook, there are data broker who will pay to facebook.in order to get facebook user data such as their interest, behavior location and others.
ReplyDeleteYes i agree with your points. After I had searched a product from Lazada.com. meanwhile I will see an advertisement about the product on my Facebook page.
ReplyDeleteI think in this era, there is no privacy for us once we used social media. It is vital for us to be very aware on which platform are we providing our personal details.
ReplyDeleteHye Eileen I agree with you. Nowadays there are no more privacy if its involved internet. There are some big companies use our private information to sell their product
ReplyDeleteNowadays, anything we do which involves the Internet requires at least our Email address, our name and age. We must be careful not to enter any personal details into untrusted sites.
ReplyDeleteI agreed, we must be careful when give our personal data because if we do not do so our data might be use by the others to gain profit for themselves by selling it.
ReplyDelete