Privacy is one of the primary concerns of those on social media, with all manner of scare stories emerging of people having identities stolen, unwanted content going viral and so on.  Such stories have precipitated a rise in concern about the privacy of what we do on social media, with many forgoing participation entirely.  Alas, a recent study from the University of Vermont highlights how your privacy can be compromised even if you’re not participating yourself.

The researchers trawled through around 30 million public posts on Twitter, which were made by nearly 14,000 users.  When this data trove was analyzed, it emerged that all it takes is content from around 9 of our contacts to enable people to accurately predict the kind of tweets we ourselves would make, even if they had no knowledge of our personal Twitter feed.

No hiding place

The content shared by our friends and contacts is enough to predict our own likes and habits with an accuracy of around 95%, even if hackers have absolutely no data on us at all.  The findings show that it’s quite possible for companies, governments or hackers to produce a pretty accurate profile of us just from the activity of our friends online.

The importance of this has become increasingly evident in recent years, with companies like Cambridge Analytica using social media to target political advertising with extreme precision.  Despite this, people still habitually reveal huge amounts about both their own life and that of their wider social circle.

It’s reasonably well known that the data we share online makes it relatively straightforward to piece together complex pictures about us and our lives, but this research sheds light on the apparent lack of a limit in the predictability such analyses can provide.  Whilst the researchers suggest we can ‘only’ achieve accuracy of around 95%, I suspect that would be scant consolation for anyone who has been profiled as a result of their friends social media activity.

“You alone don’t control your privacy on social media platforms,” the authors conclude, “Your friends have a say too.”