Profiling online social networks users: an omniopticon tool

Online social networks (OSN) and media indicate and incorporate the shift to interpersonal, horizontal and mutual communication and, thus information aggregation. In our previous research we have demonstrated that it is possible and potentially trivial to extract personal sensitive information such as political beliefs and psychosocial about OSN users in an automated manner. Our research highlights how Web 2.0 and OSNs (YouTube and Twitter) may become a topos of participatory panopticism, an omniopticon in which the many watch the many and can reconstruct sensitive information out of seemingly anonymous data/content. We focus on the results of this type of surveillance that facilitates the exculpation of such penetrating and privacy-violating technologies and amplifies the threshold of societal tolerance towards a panopticon-like state of surveillance. Furthermore, we analyse and discuss implications of data mining as data processing with focus on the new European law and the legal framework in the USA.