Data privacy is one of the major concerns that users have with using internet. The issue got highlighted due to the Facebook data leak case that has been making news for some days now. If super secured and popular networks such as Facebook are not safe then there is certainly a topic to worry about. Let’s gather some knowledge through this article about how much the social media platforms and search engines actually know about you.
Search Engines
To know what they know, we should know about the sources from which they collect our data. Even if search engines don’t sell data but they earn most of their money from advertisements and for that they need our data. From the website we browse to the queries we type in search engines, it all gets collected and ads according to our interest are shown on screens.
In case of Google, it collects YouTube data also, earlier it used to obtain Gmail data also which was stopped in June last year. This data is shared with developers and third-party app makers.
Social Media Networks
Facebook alone has over 2 billion users and has the access to all the things you do on its app and website. This involves your posts, profile image, likes, comments and friend list and location. It becomes very easy to detect your habits using all this information.
The process is same for Instagram, Snapchat, Twitter and WhatsApp also. There are some options to control this, but it can never be avoided completely.
These social media networks don’t sell the data directly but provide information to the advertisers in a way they can get maximum output resulting in giving money to these platforms. Twitter, provides access to an internal search engine to the partner advertisers.
The thing that makes the situation dangerous is after using the data for apps developers can save it use in future for different purposes without letting social media platforms and search engines know about it.
There is no way to be 100 percent sure about the privacy on internet and multiple ways are available to make the misuse of data. We hope that this would have given you an idea of how the data is been getting stolen and being used for different purposes about which users are unaware of.
