Question

How is social media being used to map what someone is or knows? What can be done with that information?

Answer 1

When we consider social media, we can say that the use of analytics, primarily derived from data collected from the user activity can be used to determine human behavior, and the fact that the data can be tracked with specificity of the user can be considered as another way social media is being utilized to collect data from a broad population.

We know that social media tracks out location, our check-ins, where we interact with individuals, our IM chats as well as any interaction such as clicks, views and how much time we spend on a mainly web-based source. If it is connected to social media, it is being tracked. With this extensive variety of information and data analytics capabilities of modern computers and machine learning systems, the companies have been able to map out what someone is, knows or does when they are online,

The information can be used in different areas for different purposes like for example, our click-based history can be used to determine our shipping interests, focused advertisements can then be forwarded to us based on our personal preferences and thereby, companies can make use of this information to “sell us something”, they can also use this data for quality and research purposes like for scientific experiments since the data collected can be somewhat random and non standard.