User:Lanuordiy/sandbox

data access method
There are several ways for others to access user information.

share it with third parties
Nearly all of the most popular apps on Facebook—including Farmville, Causes, and Quiz Planet—have been sharing users' information with advertising and tracking companies.

Even though Facebook’s privacy policy says they can provide “any of the non-personally identifiable attributes we have collected” to advertisers, they violate this policy. If a user clicked a specific ad in a page, Facebook will send the address of this page to advertisers, which directly led to a profile. In that case, it is easy to identify users’ name.

API
Application programming interface(API) is a set of routines, protocols, and tools for building software applications. By using query language, sharing content and data between communities and applications become much easier. APIs simplify all that by limiting outside program access to a specific set of features—often enough, requests for data of one sort or another. APIs clearly define exactly how a program will interact with the rest of the software world—saving time.

search engine
Search engine is an easy way to find information without scanning every site yourself. Key words you type into the search box effect the results. So it is necessary to make your keywords precisely and correctly. There are lots of search engines, some may led you to a fake sites which may get your personal information or laden with viruses. And some search engines, like DuckDuckGo, concerns your privacy.

make use of data
This accessible data along with data mining technology, users’ information can be used in different way to improve customer service.

According to what you retweet, what you like and the hashtag, twitter can recommend some topics and advertisements. Twitter’s suggestions for who to follow is done by this recommendation system. Commerce, such as Amazon, make use of uses’ information to recommend items for users. Recommendations are based on at least prior purchases, shopping cart and wishlist. Affinity analysis is a data mining technique that used to understand the purchase behavior of customers.

By using machine learning method, whether a user is a potential follower of Starbucks can be predicted. In that case, it is possible to improve the quality and coverage of applications. In addition, user profiles can be used to identify similar users.

According to Gary Kovacs’s speech about Tracking our online trackers, when he use internet to find an answer to a question, “We are not even 2 bites into breakfast and there are already nearly 25 sites that are tracking me”, and he was navigated by 4 of them.

privacy concern
On Facebook, there is one way to ensure protection against apps sharing your information. On privacy setting page, you can remove or turn off unwanted or spammy applications.