Our Data, Ourselves by Lipton Jacqueline D.;

Author:Lipton, Jacqueline D.;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: University of California Press
Published: 2022-10-26T00:00:00+00:00

WHAT DO THEY DO WITH ALL THAT DATA?

We have talked a lot in previous chapters about targeted marketing as one of the biggest reasons companies collect personal data, particularly online service providers that do not charge members a fee for their services, like Facebook and YouTube. We have also noted that sometimes our information can be accessed by hackers and, in worrying situations, can potentially be obtained by foreign governments. In 2019 and 2020, along with concerns about not complying with American laws on children’s privacy, the popular video-sharing app TikTok was criticized for opening the way for the Chinese government to obtain personal information about its users in America and other countries.3

It is relatively easy to be mindful of the information we share online, and we have looked at strategies for doing this in previous chapters, notably in chapter 4, where we discussed the typical terms of service and privacy policies of online service providers like Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, Pinterest, and Amazon. We are probably a little less mindful of the fact that the questions we type into search engines like Google can be stored and utilized by data aggregators in a variety of contexts, and that the mobile devices we carry with us often provide location tracking services, which are able to provide our demographic information to businesses and governments. For example, the amount of traffic in particular shopping areas can provide useful data about promising venues for new brick-and-mortar businesses.

The bottom line is that most of us never have a clear picture of how far and wide our data is being shared. Technology commentator Louise Matsakis put it this way:

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