http://www.wariscrime.com/2012/03/15/news/why-social-media-is-killing-your-online-privacy/
With Google at over 2 billions users, Facebook at over 845 million users, and Twitter at over 300 million users, these companies have data stores which are literally worth billions of dollars. They use this information to sell ads on their own network (e.g., Facebook generated $3.2 Billion last year in advertising revenue — not bad huh?), or sell the information to companies like DataSift.
Facebook starts sending ads to your “friends” based on this information, and even uses your name and photos in the ads. And soon, all of that information will end up in the hands of DataSift.
If you want to see the end result of all this lost privacy, go to Spokeo and enter in your name and state.
http://www.mywot.com/en/scorecard/spokeo.com
If You Aren’t Part of the Solution, You Are Part of the Problem
If you go to Spokeo’s Privacy page (where you can find out how to remove your records from their service) you can see all the ways they collect information about you for their service — namely, by aggregating data from the following sources:
Phonebooks
Social Networks
Real Estate Records
Marketing Surveys
Online Maps
Meanwhile, it's absolutely ludicrous that the U.S. can't provide us with privacy and data protection laws that are at least as strict as those in Europe.
http://www.mywot.com/en/scorecard/beenverified.com
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ChoicePoint
http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2012/03/ff_nsadatacenter/all/1
The NSA Is Building the Country’s Biggest Spy Center (Watch What You Say)
The upshot, according to this official: “Everybody’s a target; everybody with communication is a target.”
