It doesn’t matter if you are on Facebook or not; your friends are leaking key facts about your life to others, reveals a new study.
Researchers from the University of Vermont in the US and University of Adelaide in Australia gathered more than 30 million public posts on Twitter from 13,905 users. With this data, they showed that information within the Twitter messages from eight or nine of a person’s contacts make it possible to predict that person’s later tweets as accurately as if they were looking directly at that person’s own Twitter feed.
The findings showed that, at least in theory, a company, government or other actor can accurately profile a personm such as learning their political affiliation, favourite products, religious commitments and more, from their friends, even if they’ve never been on social media or don’t have an account any more.