Datamining. Good or Bad?

Earlier on I wrote a post about personal branding and how important it is to distinguish yourself on the internet. You have to be clear about who you are and what you do. However, nowadays it is not uncommon that a part of this (general) information (for example your name, job function or relationship status) is collected to create databse of information. For example, Facebook stores information about when people’s relationship status changed. This resulted in the graphic below. The process of this kind of information storage is called datamining.

But what can you do with datamining? For us, as ‘normal’ social media users, it’s fun to see those graphics. Did you know that the most male CEO’s are called Peter? LinkedIn gave us this kind of information, together with the funny fact that people with longer names, have lower-paid jobs. However, for the business industry it’s big business. If 125 people from Tilburg ‘like’ the Burger King, they can decideto open a store in Tilburg. So with the help of social media products and services can be optimized. Trends can be analyzed, and the producers can respond to what they believe the consumer founds interesting. And because that’s where the money is, this kind of information has great value.

Social media are very willing to share the information they’ve collected, but they have to be careful because they don’t want to lose their users. At the moment we’ve found something better, cheaper or nicer we move to another provider. But the question is, to what extent are social media providers taking risks to collect the most important data? Is there still anything private?

What do you think of datamining and to what extent do you believe that social media providers are allowed to use our (private) information?