A shadow profile is a collection of information pertaining to an application's users, or even some of its non-users, collected without their consent.
[1] The term is most commonly used to describe the manner in which technological companies such as Facebook[2] collect information related to people who did not willingly provide it to them.
[3] In 2012, a data breach of over six million Facebook users' personal information indicated the existence of a number of shadow profiles, since the leaked information had not been provided by the users themselves.
[citation needed] The combined profiles were then further shared with the users' friends if they used Facebook's Download Your Information (DYI) tool.
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