When Social Media Mining Gets It Wrong

A complex picture of your personal life can now be pieced together using a variety of public data sources, and increasingly sophisticated data-mining techniques. But just how accurate is that picture?

Last week in Las Vegas, at the computer security conference Black Hat, Alessandro Acquisti, an associate professor of information technology and public policy at the Heinz College at Carnegie Mellon University, showed how a photograph of a person can be used to find his or her date of birth, social security number, and other information by using facial recognition technology to match the image to a profile on Facebook and other websites. Acquisti acknowledges the privacy implications of this work, but he warns that the biggest problem could be the inaccuracy of this and other data-mining techniques. Acquisti says that his current work is an attempt "to capture the future we are walking into." In this future, he sees online information being used to prejudge a person on many levels—as a prospective date, borrower, employee, tenant, and so on. The Internet, he says, could become "a place where everyone knows your name"—a worldwide small town that won't let you live anything down.