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It's Not Magic... It's Data-Mining!

This article is more than 10 years old.

It's a Belgian PSA regarding being careful about the information you make available about yourself online. (Via Chris Barth / Reddit.) And the data miners, of course, wear black ski masks and type very, very loudly, just as I'm sure they do in real life.

A spokesperson for Febelfin, the membership group for the Belgian financial sector, which commissioned the video tells me:

On September 12th, proppers invited random people to attend a session by Dave in a tent in Brussels. They were asked their name and address, and the proppers made them believe they would be participating in a television program. The names and addresses were then communicated to a team of researchers, who started browsing public websites in search for information they could feed the Dave character with. All the information was acquired through legitimate, publicly available sources (Facebook, Twitter, real estate websites, etc.).

The woman with a credit card number online and the other one outed for spending 200 euros on alcohol last month probably want to start doing some digital house-cleaning stat.

In the same vein, check out "Facebook's Gen Y Nightmare," Frédéric Filloux's imagining of a dystopic future in which a decade of social networking data is very effectively mined to determine whether or not to give a law grad with migraines a job.

After that, you may just want to curl into a little ball, cry a little, drink a bitter European coffee, and then delete your Facebook account.