Social Media Data Mining Can be Brutal

Some companies are starting to use data from Facebook and others to gather information about prospective employees and others they might deal with. Through personal profiles, postings they place and postings about them from friends, a great deal can be learned. But how accurate is such information? How long should young people, or anyone for that matter, be penalized for past indiscretions, mistakes or bad behaviour? How can companies and others control their use of social media data? Should controls be imposed through legislation?

These are emerging issues that provide a strong indication of the way of the future. There seems little doubt that social media data will be used more and more in future, for everything from employment to credit applications to criminal investigations. Serious errors of identity in any of these areas could be devastating for the victim.

At the recent Blackhat conference, held in Las Vegas, one presenter showed how facial recognition could be used for finding such information as Facebook profiles and pictures of individuals on the internet. He also showed how misleading this information could be. A write-up is found on the Technology Review site.

As pointed out in that same article, other researchers have conducted tests to determine the correlation between a persons character traits as determined through interviews and questionnaires as opposed to the findings from Facebook profiles. They found the correlations to be weak.

While this is an emerging area, it is one of paramount importance.  One can only imagine the horror stories that are bound to emerge as social media data mining gains more prevalence.