Data and your profile

Have you ever wondered what’s all the fuss about FaceBook and other social media sites? As one of my mentors said,  “it’s the data stupid!”

Take for example digitalselfie an open source software project that’s a Chrome extension. See a sample screen shot below.

Screenshot from 2017-02-20 21-09-22.png

The longer the extension is installed, the more data it has work with and correspondingly the same with the history you have on FaceBook with your profile. A portion of the about page from the Data Selfie site follows…

Data Selfie explores our relationship to the online data we leave behind as a result of media consumption and social networks. In the modern age, almost everyone has an online representation of oneself and we are constantly and actively sharing information publically on various social media platforms. At the same time we are under constant surveillance by social media companies and “share” information unconsciously. How do our data profiles, the ones we actively create, compare to the profiles made by the machines at Facebook, Google and Co. – the profiles we never get to see, but unconsciously create?