Data mining of social media activity is now commonplace in business intelligence circles. Over the past 18 months, this stream of BI has experienced a surprising rate of growth and reached high levels of sophistication. Just a few years ago, consumer-facing businesses were stuck in the world of static “focus groups” and paper surveys. But even the most forward-looking organizations could not have imagined the current scenario, where new nuggets of data on consumer behavior and preferences are waiting to be harnessed by a cutting-edge BI IT infrastructure. Even the US government, which usually lags behind any technological trend, is also looking to get in on the action. The Obama administration has expressed keen interest in data mining content posted on the White House's Facebook, YouTube and Twitter pages. Anything on the Internet is a perfect playground for extreme data mining practices. Once something is distributed on the World Wide Web, it will forever serve as fodder for a business intelligence or data mining application somewhere in the universe of cyberspace. But despite our better judgment about the photos we upload to Facebook or the posts we post to MySpace and YouTube, in the heat of the moment, our caution often fails us. Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on “Why Violent Video Games Should Not Be Banned”? Get an original essay Indeed, social media is, in large part, about vanity: we want all our friends and colleagues to see how cool and fulfilling our activities are. life is: what we ate for dinner; what fancy places we visited; how our dogs made a mess on the living room carpet. Vanity (and electronic narcissism) will always take the form of impulsivity, which is not a good character trait when publishing under your own name, especially when your publication is likely to remain in the public domain for a long time . For many social media sites, the terms of service (TOS) are explicitly clear and specific: if you post content to the site, you are essentially granting the site permission to use the content for any purpose it sees fit. appropriate. Although each site is different in its irrevocable and perpetual right to reproduce information found in your posts, it is wise to err on the side of caution. No matter how private you consider content to be, privacy controls generally only go so far - the line between private sites and websites. and public information remains unclear at best. In some cases, once you submit content, it may instantly become the intellectual property of the social networking site, even if you delete or purge the submission in its entirety. Speaking from personal experience, the range of privacy options on my favorite social media sites is quite robust; Nonetheless, these privacy controls never fail to confuse me every time I change them, leaving me uncertain about how my sensitive information and opinions will be used. Little do users of the world's most popular social networking site know that Facebook recently launched a highly controversial Instant Personalization feature that essentially "transfers" a registered member's profile data from Facebook to external third-party websites. What is.