Yes, the data about each and every individual out there on the internet is the new gold. The digital footprint that we leave behind is so huge that with a little bit of your information and analysis one can actually tell you with whom you are going to dinner date with. Ever got surprised when the product you were looking for on amazon/flipkart in the website on PC/laptop made its advertisement entry into Instagram feeds even worse is its entry into the IG stories on the mobile app. This is in marketing terms is called as “Re-targeting”.

Retargeting

Some of us must have also experienced a friend suggestion from Facebook , in FB’s terms lets call this feature People You May Know(PYMK), that a person might be suggested in your PYMK with whom you are a member on a Whatsapp group. Have a conversation with a friend after long time on Whatsapp, then his/her feed will populate your news feed over FB/IG. Its to common knowledge that WA/IG/FB are under one hood.

How Facebook Figures Out Everyone You've Ever Met

Give the above article a read and you will be amazed to see some new findings on social media.

TBH I wanted to write this article only after reading the below article,

The Data That Turned the World Upside Down

This is article analyses how a company called as Cambridge Analytica made some of the 2017’s some of the biggest shocking moments such as Brexit and made Trump as POTUS, all with digital data of millions of people mined, analysed and specifically targeted. I wont get into every details of the article and leave it as an exercise to the reader, inspired from engineering books ;-) but I will highlight some of the results they arrived at.

  1. Analyzing your FB profile and your likes for pages/posts and with 10 such kind of likes added with some clever data-tools one can easily predict the kind of person you are.
  2. With 70 of such likes, the things you knew can be predicted.
  3. And with 150 of your likes, one can easily tell what your parents knew about you.
  4. Analyzing 300+ such likes can some revealing facts about yourself which you might not even know :-(
  5. I will quote this exactly from the site,
For example, men who “liked” the cosmetics brand MAC were slightly more likely to be gay; one of the best indicators for heterosexuality was “liking” Wu-Tang Clan. Followers of Lady Gaga were most probably extroverts, while those who “liked” philosophy tended to be introverts

Even though Hilary had some of the big names of the tech industry like Google for her backing, its just interesting to know that the world’s largest country is not China nor India, its Facebook in context of population, helped Donald Trump.

From the Paradise papers , one can easily learn that the social media giants like Facebook and Twitter were funded by Russians on a series of events for the Trump’s campaign.

Russia funded Facebook and Twitter investments through Kushner investor

It strikes now that a dialogue from Tamil movie Thani Oruvan makes sense,

ஒவ்வொரு சின்ன விஷயத்துக்கு பின்னாடியும் ஒரு மறைக்கப்பட்ட பெரிய நியூஸ் இருக்கு
There is a big news hidden behind every small happenings.

Finally,

The design team of Cambridge Analytica must be so innovative to design their logo,

Brain graph with nodes and edges as on social media

Give all the articles a read, and you can conclude how Donald Trump became the President.

Oh, wait, look who is approaching CA from India,

Big data firm Cambridge Analytica in talks with Indian opposition party for 2019 polls: Sources

My first full on article, claps, comments are welcome :-)

P.S : If you still think Facebook and Instagram are mere mediums to share your moments, read again ;-)