It is perhaps a significant concern that internet users willingly and sometimes unwittingly share their personal and private information through online social networks without a second thought for how that information might …
April 29,2022 It is perhaps a significant concern that internet users willingly and sometimes unwittingly share their personal and private information through online social networks without a second thought for how that information might be used. There is an ongoing risk of identity theft and users being the victim of other cybercrimes such as scams and phishing attacks. The obverse of perceiving all this shared information is that for researchers hoping to understand the trends within society, the information offers a vast seam of data, opinions, and behavior that could be mined to extract nuggets of information about humanity. It might even be used to predict how behavior online and offline might change. For researchers hoping to dig into this motherlode of data, however, there is a significant obstacle. Many users have accounts on many different social networks and do not necessarily maintain consistency in terms of biography, demographic, data, and identity per se, across the different platforms.
