Mark Cuban Warns of Dangers of Digital Profiling

Launches apps to make digital footprints disappear

In a promotional video posted on Inc.com, billionaire investor Mark Cuban paints a dark picture of the ways in which social media activity can be used against individuals in the near future. But while the Shark Tank host warns that "our privacy is disintegrating," he's also got some good news: there's an app for that.

In the brief promotional video, Cuban lays out the dangers of allowing one's online activity to remain in the public sphere indefinitely, providing some examples of ways public and private entities will be able to use individuals' activity against them in the future via new digital profiling technology.

"The biggest mistake people make in social media is they let their posts live forever," he says. Citing applications that are now collecting "every" online post you make to create digital profiles of people, Cuban warns that they will be used "in every walk of life."

"You're going to go look for a job and they're going to run an online social media analysis on you and use that as a psychological profile of you," he warns, predicting that such profiles will also be used in lawsuits against individuals.

The solution, Cuban argues, is to find ways to maintain control of our digital activity, in large part by removing traces of it regularly. In order to enable people to do just that, Cuban has helped develop two apps: Xpire and CyberDust, which automatically wipe away digital traces of messages.

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