This is the sixth post in a series debunking some common misunderstandings about online privacy. The images used in these posts have been adapted from a tutorial given by Gerald Friedland at ACM Multimedia in Nara, Japan in October. Read previous posts: one, two, three, four, five.

The fact that you post boring things, like pictures of what you ate for breakfast, doesn't make you invisible online. Although it may sometimes seem like nobody is paying attention, advertisers are always paying attention, and data you post is collected by social networks and other businesses in order to tailor ads to your tastes and (hopefully) increase profits as a result. Maybe you don't mind that social networks are paying attention to your breakfast, but it's good to be aware that even seemingly insignificant posts online *are* tracked by somebody, often as part of a marketing strategy to increase profits.