Tagging Matters - The Era of Social Monitoring

Geo location and other face tagging functions can help one categorising and classifying photographs, adding consistency to social media live updates or even tracking a trip itinerary.
From a marketing perspective it is a great source of information that is increasingly used as a way to enhance revenue, estimated to generate $10b by 2013.
However, foot print data can provide multiple personal details that makes it easy to monitor individuals.
Most information is interconnectable between platforms and privacy settings often become irrelevant as data propagates between web applications, for example from Twitter to Linkedin or Picasa to Gmail-contacts.

All that traceability wouldn't be possible without people's willingness to provide updates.

But what does exactly encourage individuals to share private information online?

The motivations can obviously be numerous, from being visible to a social network, to shaping a public profile, or staying in touch with connections, if not for the benefit of loyalty programs inciting an audience to collect points and rewards.

It doesn't require much effort to maintain a reasonable level of activity on a Facebook wall just by occasionally checking into places.

It is also quite convenient for many to demonstrate interest in a topic by just quoting (or retwitting) others.

As never before, people are voluntarily or involuntarily uploading personal information on social media, such as geotags, clickstream, IP-to-location mapping, facetags and those information are indeed very valuable to marketers.

It makes it rather easy to monitor an employee, follow a brand or a company, screen who is mentioning one's name on the internet or even bug the kids.

Unless isolated initiatives from web browser makers, adding anonymity functions in their software, it is a real challenge to remain invisible on the internet.