Commercial Use of SNS Information by Data Brokers - Individuals Becoming Visible, Everyday Lives Being Traded

Commercial Use of SNS Information by Data Brokers - Individuals Becoming Visible, Everyday Lives Being Traded
From the late 2000s through the 2010s, the explosion of social networking services (SNS) ushered in an era in which people's "actions" were digitally recorded like never before. Even trivial actions such as what people "liked," what they shared, and which advertisements they clicked on were stored as valuable "psychological resources" (i.e., personal data).

Against this backdrop, information brokers, known as "data brokers," have grown rapidly. They made huge profits by collecting and processing data from social networking services and other web services and selling it to corporations. For example, it has become known as a result of psychological research since around 2013 that it is possible to estimate gender, age, education, political orientation, and even sexual orientation from users' "like" tendencies and posting history.

A prime example is the widely reported "Cambridge Analytica case" in 2018, which shocked the world when tens of millions of user data collected via Facebook were used for psychological analysis and incorporated into election strategies without the knowledge of individuals. The case was highlighted as a new threat to democracy, and the phrase "social networking is free, but the price is 'your personality'" became a reality.

At the same time, such data began to be used as a "precision guided missile" in criminal investigations and marketing, including advertising that targets specific demographics (microtargeting) and risk prediction by the police (predictive policing).

However, this structure carries with it the risk of serious privacy violations: many social networking users do not understand how their "likes" and posts are actually collected and used. Moreover, in many cases, these data are being sold "anonymized" without the knowledge of the individual, and consumer protection laws have not kept pace.

In the 2010s, the EU enacted the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), which brought transparency and control over data use, but legal systems in the U.S. and Japan were slow to respond, and commercial data use continued to take precedence.

In this way, social networking sites became not only a place to connect people, but also a "trade show of emotions and trends," and a society was formed in which personal information was unknowingly monetized by third parties called data brokers.