Everything sounds dodgier prefixed “shadow”, but the “shadow Facebook account” is unsettling in a whole new way. A study has found that even people with no Facebook account – which is one in five British internet users – still have such a presence on the accounts of their families and friends that it was possible to predict their behaviours with 95% accuracy.
Clearly, if you are a digital native, who has taken an anti-Facebook stance, whether because you have read Jaron Lanier’s magisterial book Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts, or merely because you are defying mainstream modernity and probably also like vinyl, this is a new level of incursion. As if it weren’t bad enough that a social media giant could track your every move, destroy your privacy not so much by invading it as by simply rolling you into everybody else who bought the same stuff; that Facebook can guess your politics by whether or not you bought some Mahabis, and then describe them better than you can; it can work out all these things even when you’ve expressly asked it not to.
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