It
sometimes appears that the world is divided into two groups: people who are on
Facebook and those who are not. Many of the regular Facebook posters are not
too concerned with their privacy. They are happy to share lots of their
opinions and doings with the wider world.
At
the same time, many people that I’ve spoken to say that they value their
privacy too highly to share things casually and hence avoid Facebook with its
temptation to bare all. But it now appears that not joining Facebook is no
protection as the network engines have algorithms that can make pretty good
forecasts about non-members who may be connected to members (1).
The
authors considered the population of five large universities and trained their
computer on their feature extraction methodology to connect the out-crowd to
the in-crowd and set up people in their actual sets with reasonable accuracy.
So
being a non-member of a social network doesn’t mean that your profile is
missing from some predictive list that may help to target marketing of new must
have products. That is relatively benign compared to the lists that you could
be on if you happen to reside in country that takes a dim view of some
political ties.
