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Is Our Personal Information Safe on Google, Facebook and LinkedIn?

A question came to my mind today when I saw a new message on Facebook indicating that to keep Facebook free, customized ads based on members interests will be shown on our profiles or dashboard.

Today as well I saw a suggested list of people that I might know on LinkedIn. One of them is a friend of mine that we have never exchanged an email or even connected on social media. This friend has 0 friends on his friends list so there is no common people between us. Same question came to my mind again. How the social media and search engines are able to make this semantic networks!

Google Search uses our search history to show results that might be of our interests, it also use the same information to show related ads. Google is a free search that we use and they make money out of the ads. It is a mutual benefit, we search for free and they make money from ads we see based on our search keywords.

Same scenario in Social Media, so Facebook and LinkedIn, and other Social Networks use the same concept to keep running and make profit.

So our profiles, friend lists, search history is used by second party and third party applications, applications that we know and application that we don't know. Security and Privacy policies change from time to time without previous notice this happened more than once on Facebook.

We need to think carefully before we publish anything on our walls or maybe before we search. We need to keep a private circle that no one can get into! Are we able to do so while we use the social media?

It is easy to analyse our interactions with social media and search engines, those analysis that made by intelligent robots and semantic tools are not available to us, it is available to parties that we don't know about! who could access these information? Why? Who gives the permit?

Many questions that we have no answers to! We can't even delete the data we published! We can't remove our Facebook account!

We have to be careful and understand the side effects that we could face out of publishing sensitive data about ourselves and what we do. 
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