Apart from seeing targeted ads, why is data collected by companies about users a bad thing?
In: Technology
It could, and likely already has, lead to missuse. Back in 2012 there was a story about a person finding out their teen daughter was pregnant through mailed ads from Target.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/kashmirhill/2012/02/16/how-target-figured-out-a-teen-girl-was-pregnant-before-her-father-did/
While there is some speculation that it never happened, it raises some serious questions about privacy.
https://medium.com/@colin.fraser/target-didnt-figure-out-a-teen-girl-was-pregnant-before-her-father-did-a6be13b973a5
Equally important to the conversation is whether or not the consumer should be compensated for generating revenue, what level of buying manipulation happens with your data, abd who ultimately owns said information. Could your employer or insurance provider be able to use your data to make value based judgements on you? Should you be paid a premium for collecting your information?
We have moved beyond the old argument of “Just don’t go online” if you don’t want your data out there.
We don’t know… And that makes it bad.
Don’t get me wrong, I don’t think I have much to hide except a vice or two I want kept from my employer… That being said though, we don’t know how or when the location tracking and data tracking will be used against our interest.
If they can hear me talk about a product I never look up… What else can they hear?
It is this combined with the unreadable privacy and usage agreements that many are uncomfortable with.
Another form of misuse of the data: imagine there’s a correlation between your shoe size and your history of committing crime. The correlation is strictly non-causal (shoe size doesn’t CAUSE more crime), but the pattern is robust (there is a real correlation).
A company can sell this information to employers who can use that information to discriminate against applicants because it leads to a tiny but positive effect on quality of hires. The downside is that it’s still pretty random (a lot of people are being discriminated against despite not actually having a criminal record, only for the correlation between shoe size and criminal record).
Further, imagine they don’t know your shoe size, But the algorithm can guess your shoe size based on the third letter of your last name with a small, but noticeable degree of accuracy (above chance). So now you’re being discriminated against for your criminal record that was a guess based on your shoe size that was furthermore a guess based on something else unrelated.
There’s lots of “black box” algorithms that can be made. Black box refers to the idea that the companies know what variables go into the box (X) and it can see the effect (output, Y) of the box, but, to some degree, don’t understand ***how*** X leads to Y. And there’s plenty of bs things that can happen from this if they’re not careful or don’t care. E.g., maybe Black people are more likely to have a last name with the third letter B, and their algorithm ends up suggesting discriminatory advice that ends up mostly affecting black people.
Finally, with all this data, they can totally invade your privacy. They can guess your exact address, nationality, health history, whatever using bits and pieces of information with some accuracy because of their large datasets and modern techniques for analyzing data. And then my personal info gets sold or stolen. In a way, it’s as simple as knowing Gonzalez is a common hispanic last name. But because of large datasets, it goes way, way beyond that.
And imagine how easy it would be to steal from someone’s house if they hacked some phone service and got my GPS data. They could guess what times I’m not at home (pre or post corona-times haha).
You’re forced to trust that the company will respect and protect your private information. A lot of private data has been leaked and continues to be leaked due to security breaches of web sites that collect your private information. Also, you can’t really know for sure where your private information is going to be sent to and used for.
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