Mark Cuban: Social Media Will Put Minority Report to Shame

Billionaire entrepreneur and Shark Tank member Mark Cuban is an Internet veteran. He knows a thing or two about the web and where social media is going. In this chilling video, he paints a dystopian picture of businesses (and governments?) using your social media friends and actions to perform predictive analyses straight out of the pages of Minority Report.

Damned If You Do

Minority Report

Fair Use media file via Wikimedia.

“The biggest mistake that people make in social media is that they let their posts live forever. I think we are about to go through a huge transformation in digital media, for the simple reason that people are starting to recognize that privacy – our privacy – is disintegrating in a lot of respects.”

Cuban goes on to explain that many social media users don’t realize that every person you follow, every post you like, every update you retweet, is catalogued and indexed. This data is being used to create a profile of you as a person that defines who you are and tries to predict what you’ll do next. It will be used not just to market to you, but in all walks of life.

“You’re going to go look for a job and they’re going to run an online social media analysis of you and use that as a psychological profile… And then what’s going to happen, is you’re going to be walking down the street and they’re going to recognize who you are from video facial recognition and they’re going to say, ‘Ah. There’s Mark Cuban. We’ve already run the analysis on him because we anticipated that he shops here and he doesn’t live far from here, so it’s very likely that he’ll be here and we already know what he likes.’ And it’s going to put Minority Report and very other sci-fi movie to shame. And every single one of these things – I’m working on now.”

Damned If You Don’t

So what’s the solution? Scrap your social media profiles? That’s probably not a great career move. The following infographic from CareerGlider shows just how critical it can be.

the importance of social media in your job search

 

Cuban mentions that he is working on solutions to these problems. One app, CyberDust, helps reign in control of your text messages. The other app, Xpire, promises to shrink your digital footprint by deleting old tweets and retweets and unfollowing people.

These are important concepts. Taken out of context, what could your text messages, Tweets, or Facebook updates mistakenly say about you? It’s worth considering.

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