Shadow profiles: the data of others

You don't even have to be a member of one of the many social networks or messenger services – the networks most likely have information about you anyway. Through information and addresses that your contacts share in the network, enough information can be puzzled together to draw conclusions about you – even if you have never logged into the network.

Put simply: if the network knows that most of your contacts play handball, live in Konstanz and are interested in migration policy, then the chances are good that the same applies to you. Such unofficial profiles, known as "shadow profiles", are pieced together from the available "indirect information" collected about you.

In our article "Shadow profiles: the data of others", researchers at the University of Konstanz's Centre for Human | Data | Society (CHDS) explain

• How shadow profiles are created
• Whether they are legal
• Why shadow profiles pose a challenge for our understanding of informational self-determination
• How we can address this problem

Read the full campus.kn article at: https://www.campus.uni-konstanz.de/en/science/shadow-profiles-the-data-of-others

Quotes:

• "At present, there is no widespread awareness among the public that sharing my own data also means sharing information about others. My data is always simultaneously the data of others."
  Liane Wörner, professor of criminal law, criminal procedural law, comparative criminal law, medical criminal law and legal theory at the University of Konstanz and director of the Centre for Human | Data | Society (CHDS)

• "If we think that privacy is just an individual choice, we miss the bigger picture. Privacy is not an individual phenomenon. Privacy is a collective responsibility."
  David Garcia, professor of social and behavioural data science at the University of Konstanz