{"id":13144,"date":"2016-10-04T09:00:27","date_gmt":"2016-10-04T13:00:27","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.kaspersky.com\/blog\/?p=13144"},"modified":"2019-11-15T06:52:56","modified_gmt":"2019-11-15T11:52:56","slug":"social-network-identity-discovery","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.kaspersky.com\/blog\/social-network-identity-discovery\/13144\/","title":{"rendered":"How private are you on social networks? Check!"},"content":{"rendered":"

For the most part, we all love social networks \u2014 some more than others, of course. Really, how could you not? Social media networks make it unbelievably easy to connect with friends, family, coworkers, and strangers around the world, all for the entry price of free.<\/p>\n

And though the adage \u201cif you aren\u2019t paying for the product, you are<\/em> the product,\u201d may lurk in the back of our minds, there are always ways to secure your privacy. Right?<\/p>\n

Google and Facebook routinely shoot pop-ups at their users reminding them to do a privacy checkup to understand and choose what they share with the world. We\u2019ve covered that<\/a>, in fact, and provided<\/a> tips<\/a> as well.<\/p>\n

Knowing the privacy settings you can change is all well and good, but what isn\u2019t often addressed is what data social sites collect about<\/em> you. You see, Google and social networks are huge data warehouses. They use their data to finely tune ads and charge businesses a premium to push ads to the right people.<\/p>\n

What Facebook knows<\/h3>\n

Last week, I was having a conversation with a colleague about an article on ProPublica<\/a> that promised to break the black box and show users the data Facebook has on them. Interest piqued, I installed the Chrome plugin and gave it a whirl.<\/p>\n

It turns out the ProPublica tool and the Facebook ad engine had a decent idea of who I was. However, far more interesting was what they thought they knew about my life.<\/p>\n

\"How<\/a><\/p>\n

For example, Hobbies and Activities included a few oddities: Fresh Step Litter, Norton Motorcycle Company, and BFGoodrich Tires. I have not owned a cat in a few years and have no clue what the Norton Motorcycle Company is. My guess for those is that I clicked on a link that was tied to those companies in some way, or that someone filled out a form for something and used my e-mail address or other details about me that Facebook acquired in a database buy.<\/p>\n

Overall, the plugin serves as a good check to see why you are receiving certain types of ads. For example, someone who just got pregnant and is doing searches about that is very likely to start getting some interesting ads on parenting. By the way, Facebook\u2019s ad preferences page<\/a> can help you improve the quality of the ads you see by deleting topics that the site erroneously thinks you are interested in \u2014 but the catch is, by doing so you are basically helping build out Facebook\u2019s ad database.<\/p>\n

Tracing your browsing back to Twitter<\/h3>\n

On the same day that I was testing out this tool, a tweet from Ryan Naraine from Kaspersky Lab\u2019s GReAT caught my eye.<\/p>\n

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For people who regularly browse Twitter, we can deduce their identity from their web browsing history https:\/\/t.co\/2MWU0e1b2D<\/a><\/p>\n

\u2014 Ryan Naraine (@ryanaraine) September 29, 2016<\/a><\/p><\/blockquote>\n