A shadow profile is a collection of information pertaining to an
application's users, or even some of its non-users, collected without their consent. The term is most commonly used to describe the manner in which technological companies such as
Facebook
Facebook is a social media and social networking service owned by the American technology conglomerate Meta Platforms, Meta. Created in 2004 by Mark Zuckerberg with four other Harvard College students and roommates, Eduardo Saverin, Andre ...
collect information related to people who did not willingly provide it to them.
History
In 2012, a
data breach
A data breach, also known as data leakage, is "the unauthorized exposure, disclosure, or loss of personal information".
Attackers have a variety of motives, from financial gain to political activism, political repression, and espionage. There ...
of over six million Facebook users' personal information indicated the existence of a number of shadow profiles, since the leaked information had not been provided by the users themselves.
Consequently, Facebook began linking users' shadow profiles to their respective public profiles. The combined profiles were then further shared with the users' friends if they used Facebook's Download Your Information (DYI) tool.
See also
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Internet privacy
Internet privacy involves the right or mandate of personal privacy concerning the storage, re-purposing, provision to third parties, and display of information pertaining to oneself via the Internet. Internet privacy is a subset of data privacy. P ...
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Communication privacy management theory
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Participatory surveillance
References
Facebook
Internet privacy
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