Info@wiperts.com
Everyone’s Personal Information Data is for Sale
From Facebook to Twitter, Tinder and Instagram, and everything in between, Internet and social media companies are selling our data to marketing companies, data mining companies, even to businesses looking for direct sales. The use policies and agreements of many websites are often so complicated that the average person doesn’t even understand what they are signing-up for when they join a new social media site.Companies work language into their user contracts, that you are required to agree to if you want access to their site. Those contracts often give them permission to share your data with third parties. Once you click on that agreement box, you are giving many companies the right to “share” your words, data, images, and videos. There are some companies that have a paid version of their app. Often the paid versions do not have the same broad permissions. It is important to keep in mind that nearly all free versions have given themselves carte blac to your data, and you agreed to it when you downloaded their app and “signed” their agreement page.
With Instagram, which is now owned by Facebook, all of your data is connected and shared between the two sites, if you have a Facebook account and choose to link them. All of that information is then sold or used internally to fuel other business. There are also multiple dating sites, and other websites, owned by other companies, that connect to your Facebook account. The premise is that you’ll be able to see if a potential date is a friend, or a friend of a friend, thereby making them somewhat familiar to you and not a total stranger. While this can be helpful and close the gap of uncomfortability when dating a stranger, it can also be a problem. Thinking you really know someone because someone you are friends with on Facebook is connected to them does not make that person safe or automatically give them good qualities, you still have to approach people with some realism.
Online companies use all of our data to sell more information, to track public opinion, to watch for trends and to communicate with the masses. Here’s a hypothetical situation, totally made up, but one that could be very real, say Facebook sees a trend in wearing the color pink, a lot of users are posing for pics in pink they are talking about buying pink shirts or shoes or hats, and so on. Facebook is tracking information closely like this closely. Why? So they can sell it to various interested parties. They are going to take advantage of that information. They may sell that data to clothing manufacturers or retail stores or clothing designers. Everything from new products to political opinion is tracked and sold to those who have an interest in how the general population is acting and behaving. It even tracks and reports how many followers you have. This information gathering is mainly for making money, but it isn’t always, sometimes it is political in nature. Once that data is sold, it can be resold to a fourth party, or even a fifth or sixth party. One company can buy data from Facebook, run numbers and analysis on it and then sell it to many various other companies.
Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Gmail, LinkedIn, Snapchat and many others are all free. There’s a reason these social media accounts are free. They make money selling our data. Nothing is off limits. Even if you set your accounts to private, the companies themselves sell the data we generate to other companies. It doesn’t matter who you are or how much money you have, if you have a social media account that company is tracking, using and selling your data. Wiperts internet removal service can help you get a handle on lowering risk and damage from the information you share online, now, in the past and in the future. They’re experts in the field of data privacy and can get rid of data that is unnecessary and may cause internet privacy issues for you and your family. They offer monitoring plans that keep track of personal information that is added about you and take steps to remove that data promptly.
