40 000 Dollars to Post on Facebook and Twitter?!

The robots may not have risen up yet, but ‘social media managers’ did. One would expect a suit-and-tie person to, well, suit such a fancy title. But it turns out, wearing pajamas and slippers are more their style. And it is ordinary people without tertiary education that now earns more money than qualified teachers in many countries, for far less work and shorter hours.

Why Spreading Disinformation About Yourself May Be Vital

Imagine being Mark Zuckerberg, and having exclusive access to the world's biggest goldmine: Private, and often secret, information about every single individual on earth.

   Even about those individuals not using Facebook at all, since FB tracks everyone across each of the thousands of websites you visit, whether you're logged into FB or not, whether you have a FB account or not, and capturing much of that data still when your browser is set on its most strict privacy settings, even when you use private tabs, even when all cookies and data clears when your browser closes. Using add-ons claiming to block trackers isn't foolproof either. Somewhere data always leak.

Your device — cellphone, laptop, tablet, smart fridge, smart television, anything with internet connectivity — is broadcasting some highly unique identifiers in order for your device to be able to connect to the internet. Your IP address, and more importantly, your MAC (hardware address; each device in the world has a unique number) and several other bits of data. Every bit of data gets recorded, including the size of your screen (which is why you should never maximize your Tor browser screen), and all those little bits of data adds up to form a very comprehensive forensic profile about you over a period of time.

   Online data collection is not all you should be worried about. FB buys data from credit bureaus and data aggregation companies about your offline life too. They reveal you had bought under your real name a laptop, with MAC no. xxxx. And so the dots connect, with your fake name on FB not hiding your real identity at all. This allows Mark Zuckerberg to see you missed a payment on your home loan, which indicates a weak point that can be exploited for far more nefarious reasons than just serving more personalized ads to you.