What impact does the selling of my online data have on me?
In: Technology
Your data is used to build profiles that allow companies to predict things about people like you. Most of the time data is anonymized so the companies don’t have a specific profile about you. However they can use certain things you like or dislike to predict what kind of person you are. From this they will tailor content based on what your kind of people like. There are a few reasons you might not like this.
Firstly, it is possible for someone with knowledge to figure out key information from this anonymized data. There may be a lot of taylor swift fans but perhaps only one taylor swift fan that shop for airsoft guns near memphis.
Secondly, you might not want all your ads, content, etc to become highly sanitized because this will remove all your exposure to anthing outside of your sphere. In a way this is the algorithm stereotyping you.
Another reason is the data trade guves companies a lot of large scale control. Companies can and have influenced elections by buying up personal data and using it to target ads or misinformation.
Overall its a variety of small reasons and by the tims they add up to a big reason its too late. AI art models are a good example, people did t realize that all the art they pisted was being resold as training data and now that has been used to create competion for artists. The companies essentially took the information for free and profited whuke hurting future profitd of the artists.
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