Will data mining be harmful to the LGBT community?
By Patrick Rylee – Thursday, March 29, 2018
I don’t think anyone is surprised about the revelation that Facebook and Google are mining data from our accounts. It has always been easy to use social media and forget this little downside to this technology. It wasn’t until articles started coming out about Cambridge Analytica and how much information they were able to secure from Facebook that people started to look closer at data mining by the tech giants.
If you are trying to come to terms with being gay, lesbian, bisexual, or transgender and have been looking for answers online, that information in the wrong hands could definitely be used against you. In most cases, it’s just a little bit embarrassing, but in some cases this information could have much more dire consequences.
If you live in Egypt, Indonesia or one of the 71 other countries where homosexuality is illegal and your data is sold to the governments of those countries, it could mean jail, caning or even death. While I mention extreme cases in some foreign countries, don’t forget that in 28 states in the United States, you can be fired for just being gay. Imagine your employer buying the data of his employees to see what they look at on the internet. None of the social media companies seem to have any qualms with selling the data to whomever will pay for it.
Below is a link to an article from The Guardian in the UK that lays out the different ways to review the data that Google and Facebook have been collecting on you. It’s a frightening new world we live in and it’s important that we all understand what the magnitude of this data mining is to many people.