Data mining of social media activity is now commonplace in business intelligence environments. Over the past 18 months, this BI pipeline has seen an astonishing growth rate and reached high levels of sophistication. Just a few years ago, consumer-facing companies were stuck in the world of static “focus groups” and paper surveys. But not even the most forward-thinking of these organizations could have dreamed of today's scenario, where nuggets of newly forged data on consumer behavior and preferences wait to be mined by a cutting-edge BI computing infrastructure. Even the US government, which usually lags behind any technological trend, is trying to get in on the action. The Obama administration has expressed a keen interest in data mining content posted on the White House's Facebook, YouTube and Twitter pages. Everything on the Internet is fair game for extreme data mining practices. Once something is placed on the World Wide Web, it will forever be fodder for a business intelligence or data mining application somewhere in the cyberspace universe. But despite our better judgment about the photos we upload to Facebook or the posts we make on MySpace and YouTube, in the heat of the moment our prudence often fails us. Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on "Why Violent Video Games Shouldn't Be Banned"? Get an original essay That's because social networks are, in large part, about vanity: we want all our friends and colleagues to see how beautiful and fulfilling our life is: what we had for dinner; what amazing places we visited; how our dogs made a mess on the living room carpet. Vanity (and electronically enabled narcissism) will forever take the form of impulsiveness, which is not a good character trait when posting under your own name, especially when your post may remain in the public domain for a long time. For many social media sites, the Terms of Service (TOS) are explicitly clear and precise: If you post content to the site, you are essentially granting the site permission to use the content for whatever purpose it deems appropriate. While each site is different regarding the irrevocable and perpetual right to reproduce information in your posts, it is wise to err on the side of caution. No matter how private you deem the content, privacy controls usually only go so far: the lines between private and public information remain fuzzy at best. In some cases, once you submit content, it may immediately become the intellectual property of the social networking site, even if you delete or delete the submission in its entirety. Speaking from personal experience, the range of privacy options on my favorite social media sites is quite broad; However, these privacy controls never fail to confuse me every time I tinker with them, leaving me unsure of 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 an extremely controversial instant personalization feature that essentially “transfers” a registered member's profile data from Facebook to external third-party websites. What is alarming is that Facebook lends this data without any kind of consent from the member. When the user visits one of Facebook's partner sites (such as Yelp), the site will automatically reveal (at the bottom of the page) which of the user's Facebook friends have reviewed a similar business in their area.