Social Media and Your Data

Social media has become the “goose that laid the golden egg” when it comes to data mining. With tasty nuggets of info like your age, location, marital status and personal interests, companies can hyper-target ads to you like never before. But how do social media companies get your data exactly? Isn’t it somewhat private? To a degree, yes, it is. But there’s more data about you out there beyond the info in your personal profile. Read our guide to learn more about how social media companies gather and use your data and what you can do to take charge.

A woman looking at her phone while on a subway train.

Why do social media companies need your data? It doesn’t matter if you’re scrolling Facebook and Instagram or watching videos on YouTube and TikTok; every social media platform’s goal is to keep you there consuming as much content as possible. While the platform is gathering data about your viewing habits regarding your content preferences, it’ll use the information you’ve provided about your age, gender, geographic location, and so forth to show you content that people with similar data have enjoyed. By liking, sharing, and watching content, you give the platform additional data about your interests.

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All social media platforms can also track how long you sit and look at a particular photo, watch a video, and scroll through a specific app feature. For instance, if you’re scrolling through parrot videos for hours on YouTube, you’ll get recommendations for even more parrot videos. Social media uses your data to try to personalize your experience as much as possible. While that can be good in a way—it’s not without its drawbacks.

How do social media companies use your data?Like most things in the world, social media is a business. In addition to using your data to keep you on their platform, social media companies will use it to help advertisers run ads that reach their target demographic. For example, Facebook will get more money from ad revenue if advertisers see success in running ads that reach their target demographic. The more Facebook can narrow down an audience, the more companies are willing to pay to run ads on the platform.

What can you do to limit data usage? Social media data comes from more than just your profile. Social media platforms will also draw information from your content consumption habits and cookies from your browsing history to get more personal data. Have you ever seen an ad show up for a company you’ve never heard of before related to a product or service you searched for just five minutes earlier? This is how that works. The easiest way to limit data usage on social media is to reduce the amount of personal information you share on your personal profile. Keep in mind that even if certain elements of your profile are private or hidden from the public (e.g., your phone number, location, marital status, etc.), it’s still available to the platform if you’ve filled in those fields.

“Social media uses your data to try to personalize your experience as much as possible. While that can be good in a way—it’s not without its drawbacks.”

Is there such a thing as true social media privacy? The only way to create true social media privacy is to try to game the system by creating a minimalistic or false sense of who you are. Remember that nobody requires you to use your real name, gender, location, birth date, or anything else you share. In fact, Facebook, Instagram, and TikTok make it incredibly easy to change your name to whatever you want. You could make yourself entirely incognito on any platform you want without sharing a single bit of personal information. That being said, each platform will still gather information about you based on your content creation and consumption habits, but it might not create a true picture of who you are.

A man smiling on a video call on his phone.

How can you limit your personal data on social media? Many of us enjoy being on social media because it gives us a chance to connect with people from all over the world. Whether you’re sharing photos with family and friends who have moved away over the years—or making connections with like-minded people in special interest groups—you’re sharing personal information (PII) about yourself. The best thing you can do to ensure that you and your family are not supplying TMI is to be conscious about what you’re sharing. Here are a few basic things you shouldn’t share on social media to protect not only your data, but to protect yourself from phishing and other scams:

Anything that would make it easy for someone to verify your identity
Photos of your driver’s license, passport, or credit cards
Your address
Your exact travel plans when going on vacation

When it comes down to it, nobody will ever be truly invisible on social media. Between your personal profile and the algorithms that gather your consumption data, there’s enough personal data available for the platform and advertisers to get a picture of who you are. You do have the power to limit the amount of data social media companies have on you, so it’s up to you to be careful with what you post and share on each platform.