Should Companies Collect Information About You?

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Should Companies Collect Information About You?

In the modern world, the widespread use of smartphones, tablets, and personal computers ensures the consumption of data by almost every user. The metadata of a user’s activity: their search and browsing histories, time of activity, and even location, is often collected and analyzed by browsers and websites for targeted advertisement, improvement of search engine performance, and content recommendation. While it is inevitable that some of this data will be used by user-interface platforms to improve ease of access, speed, and performance, with no limitation or regulation, these companies have access to private information. Limiting the data these companies are able to access may hinder the performance and accessibility of some platforms, but the privacy of this information outweighs the benefits of its unmitigated use; data collection on users on this grand scale must be restricted or at least made explicitly opt-in in a user-friendly manner.

Privacy concerns from a decade ago may have been about social security numbers and credit card information, but this has now expanded to include shopping preferences, home addresses, and even exact daily routines. A study done at Vanderbilt University on Google’s data collection found that over ninety requests per hour were sent from an Android platform phone during a typical day of use, including an average of one location request roughly every three minutes (Schmidt 24). These are able to provide a user’s location, accurately, down to the individual floor they are on in a multi-story building (Schmidt 11). While this information is necessary for the use and traffic updates of Google’s navigation application, Google Maps, it also informs Google’s Location API, which in turn informs Google’s Ad Personalization, providing location based advertisements for stores nearby the user (Schmidt 28). Additionally, Google’s email service, Gmail, has scanned through contents of emails both sent and received by users in order to further inform Ad Personalization, though this was officially reported to have been discontinued in 2017 (Schmidt 29, 30). The main purposes of Google’s data collection may be improvement of their platforms and ad personalization, but the amount of personal data it collects is alarming.

Search engines and web browsing platforms are not the only companies collecting data on its users. This year, Facebook was involved in a scandal with political-profiling company, Cambridge Analytica, in which user information, such as page likes, content likes, and other user behaviors were collected on over fifty million accounts, almost all of them without the user’s consent. This information was used to target digital campaign ads, model voter turnouts, and determine locations with the highest efficacy for campaigning. Additionally, this data may still be in the company’s possession despite orders to destroy it, as a former employee reported "hundreds of gigabytes on Cambridge servers, and that the files were not encrypted” (Rosenberg et al, "Trump Consultants”). Though it is no secret that social media is not a private documentation of our lives, the accessibility of this data to third-parties raises concerns, as psychological profiling through social media has emerged as a new marketing strategy.

A third major sector of companies collect personal data: online shopping. Whether it is Amazon tracking a user’s pageviews to advertise "products you may like”, or websites for otherwise brick-and-mortar stores, such as Torrid or Target, providing options to ship online products to local stores based on location information, online shopping outlets collect data and profile customers to increase sales. Algorithms used by these companies track purchase history, pageviews, account information, and spending habits to deliver more relevant advertisements, but there is a growing fear that this profiling done by these companies may be used to determine medical risk or exploit user systems, thereby reducing privacy rights of internet consumers (Carlozo, "Online Retailers”). Though there have been no major breaches of privacy through online retailers yet, the increasing data collection by these companies posits credible threats to users.

Data collection may be essential to many websites and online companies in order to function properly. However, as this data becomes more thorough and personal, privacy concerns arise. Misuse of this data or exploitation of vulnerabilities in companies’ online security not only can result in identity theft, as has been the fears of the past, but also in direct manipulation of user behavior, both online and offline. A balance must be struck between personalization of experience and privacy protection, and data collection and use must be subject to increased regulation.

 

 

Works Cited

Carlozo, Lou. "How Online Retailers Collect & Use Your Data.” Dealnews, DealNews, 23 Dec. 2013.

Rosenberg, Matthew, et al. "How Trump Consultants Exploited the Facebook Data of Millions.” The New York Times, The New York Times, 17 Mar. 2018.

Schmidt, Douglas C. Google Data Collection. Digital Content Next, 2018, Google Data Collection.