[krapp]

The network effects of popular but privacy invading platforms are what allows the lack of privacy to spread. If you use Facebook, as an example, then everyone else who uses Facebook in order to interact with you, or anyone whose face is included in a Facebook photo by you has their privacy affected by extension. Someone who's not even on Facebook but just happens to know you now has a shadow profile and their biometric data indexed somewhere in Facebook's database.

[twblalock]

> The network effects of popular but privacy invading platforms are what allows the lack of privacy to spread.

That's just a bunch of handwaving. Be specific about causality. "Network effects" is pretty much equivalent to "stuff just happens for some reason."

> Someone who's not even on Facebook but just happens to know you now has a shadow profile and their biometric data indexed somewhere in Facebook's database.

I don't believe that for a second. That's a wild accusation made with no evidence.

[krapp]

>"Network effects" is pretty much equivalent to "stuff just happens for some reason."

"network effects" simply means "everyone I know is on Facebook (or social media platform x), so I should probably be on (x) as well."

>That's a wild accusation made with no evidence.

It's a straightforward extrapolation based on what's known about the way Facebook operates.

Facebook creates "shadow profiles" of people who may not even be members, based on data provided about them by third parties:

https://motherboard.vice.com/blog/facebooks-shadow-profile-b...

Facebook also has facial recognition algorithms which allow it to identify the subject of photos, to automate tagging:

http://www.npr.org/sections/alltechconsidered/2016/05/18/477...

It's not unreasonable to assume that they build shadow profiles on every potential subject they can identify and can begin to graph relationships from, including every face they can isolate from a photograph, even if those faces don't belong to Facebook account holders.