It is pretty common knowledge that Facebook and other social media platforms (SMP) are capturing your behavior on their sites and selling it as data (anonymously of course) to the highest bidding agencies. Naturally, the question of privacy is bound to come up. Of course, Facebook or any other SMP offers a multitude of options to keep certain things hidden from your timelines or limit who can see what actions and posts. However, do you ever wonder what information is available to the public or even what the data about you being sold looks like on the other side of things? With the help of tools like Data Selfie and Stalkscan we can now have a glimpse behind the proverbial curtain.

These two tools do a couple of things that a person might find useful:

1. Data Selfie is more geared toward helping you see how a company could interpret your data and associate it with you as an anonymous individual. A weird concept to think about, but what is becoming more and more prevalent to advertisers are your habits, your age, where you live and who your friends are. They want to know your political views, what you’re saying about candidates, whose posts are you liking, how long exactly are you looking at that stranger you hardly know, Facebook’s page. If anything, these things won’t stop people from creeping on your profile, but at least you will know what they are looking at or what they can find out about you.

2. Now, a tool like Stalkscan will at least make you aware of the fact that you maybe need to adjust your privacy settings. This platform gives you a bit more of a comprehensive look at what the public can see about you.  

The moral of all this is that knowledge is power and you should want to know how things work. Take the reigns of your digital footprint as much as possible. We all know that digital privacy concerns are a hot topic and an ever growing concern but studies continue to show us that the majority of users online don’t even bother to touch the privacy settings they have available on social media platforms. It’s not always about hiding your data but rather understanding what can be deduced about you through that data.