Even if you're not on social media, they know everything about you

Even if you're not on social media, they know everything about you

Facebook, Twitter and WhatsApp are able to predict the behavior of their users and their contacts

"Tell me who your friends are and I'll tell you who you are". This popular Spanish saying can be transferred to social networks and its interest in knowing the whole environment of its users, according to professors James P. Bagrow, Xipei Liu, of the University of Vermont (USA) and Lewis Mitchell, of the University of Adelaide (Australia) published in Nature Human Behavior.

A study that has led to the analysis of more than 30 million Twitter posts of more than 13,000 users and reveals that "when you register on Facebook or another social networking platform you think you are delivering your information, but you are also delivering the information from your friends! "explains James Bagrow, a mathematician at the University of Vermont James Bagrow.

When opening a new profile, whether on Twitter or Facebook, the platforms invite their users to give more information. "Import your Gmail contacts and find people you know," invite Twitter or "people you may know" on Facebook.

A simple gesture, that of importing contacts, that opens the door for social platforms to take over the user's data and those who may not have an online account open.

According to the study of the universities of Vermont and Adelaide with this information, companies can predict the profile of a future user with a 95% probability.

"There is no place to hide in a social network," says Lewis Mitchell, senior professor of applied mathematics at the University of Adelaide in Australia.

Profiles in the shade

After the Cambridge Analytica scandal that shook the foundations of Facebook and led its founder, Mark Zuckerberg, to appear before the United States Congress between all the concepts emerged one: shadow profiles (profiles in the shadow in Castilian).

Zuckerberg's response was "I do not know anything." However, he acknowledged that Facebook has data from people who are not part of its universe, but, he assured, that Facebook does not create those hidden profiles.

The report of the professors of these two universities endorses the theory of the extensive collection of information from social networks. An example that can be verified, for example, by requesting the information that Facebook collects from the opening of the account.

In its downloadable file appear emails, which are not associated with profiles, but have interacted with the account associated with the user profile. WhatsApp has access to the mobile's contact list and therefore to the numbers of people who may think they are freed from the tentacles of social networks. Not only WhatsApp asks for this permission, Twitter and Facebook when installing your app also requests access to the contact list.

As Mitchell says in the report, "there is no place to hide in a social network."