The Impact of Social Networks on user Privacy - What Social Networks Really Learn about Their Users!

Millions of users voluntarily release private and business data at community platforms without considering potential impacts on their real lives that may come along with that. Being used for personalized advertisement or profiling, user data are of utmost importance for economic success of the platform. Hence, platform providers exploit all promising options to gather data while privacy seems partially to be a pain for them. Beside data voluntarily released by the user, there are techniques and methods to secretly gather more user data, e.g., by proper fusion of miscellaneous information such as analysis of websites visited or social games played. In this article we investigate obvious as well as concealed data gathering options of platform providers. By that we uncover the true detailedness of user data collected by social networks to document our key message, i.e., social networks know EVERYTHING about their users. Finally, we discuss why existing privacy protecting solutions cannot stand up with the threats and risks resulting from easygoing use of social networks.