Internet security is one of the issues that most of us deal with to some extent. In this regard, digital privacy is often a somewhat neglected area by us and the media. There is a lot of our personal data circulating on the net, and people who focus on trading it sell it for a lot of money.
It's a bit ironic that some of the features that make the internet work better for us, like files cooki.e., they provide a space for tracking our activities. While it may be uncomfortable to be aware of the extent of data that marketers and other entities can work with to target content, there are also much more nefarious uses, one of which is the so-called doxxing, a digital attack in which the personal data of a person or even a company or organization is published without consent, often with threatening or vengeful overtones.
In general, the attention of buyers of personal information is not only focused on the area of selling products and services, even if this is their main domain, but they are not reluctant to profile on the basis of certain political or ideological positions or affiliations. This thriving business is hungry, so diving into what it can learn and store about us and what some of its practices are can be useful.
Who are they and what do they strive for?
These are companies often specializing in market analysis or identity verification, whose task is to use the tools at their disposal and through the services we use to obtain virtually any available data that can be linked to a specific person. They can find out, for example, our birthday, religion, address, shopping habits and more. With respect to the methods of obtaining them, which in principle respect the relevant regulations and are therefore legal, the issue of control and further handling is particularly relevant.
It's troubling to say the least, according to James Wilson, a digital privacy expert and the company's founder My Data Removal, for example, one of the biggest players in the personal data business Acxiom "works with many Fortune 500 companies and nearly half of the Fortune 100."
When it comes to the division, we can basically talk about two categories, one of which offers its services to other businesses (B2B), extracts data from various sources, combines it, analyzes it and sells it mostly to marketing staff, while the other focuses directly on the end customer (B2C), often making a certain part of the available records available free of charge and trying to get interested parties to pay for their complete display. In addition to Acxiom, the largest B2B giants include LexisNexis, Equifax or Experian, and in the case of B2C merchants, for example, WhitePages, BeenVerified, Spokeo or GoLookUp.
How and from where is the data collected?
For starters, “personal information miners” can learn a lot from the aforementioned cookies, through which they can map our movements online. You, as he says Dan DeMers, co-founder and CEO of data collaboration platform Cinchy: “they collect data, which is enabled to some extent by consent forms and privacy policies that the vast majority of website visitors and app users typically agree to without much – if any – scrutiny .”
It often feels like consent to files cookie was the price of entry on quite a few sites, with a legibly and prominently displayed Accept button right at hand, but the Decline button is unsurprisingly either less visible or becomes the reward at the end of a rabbit hole full of convoluted permissions.
However, this method is far from the only one; in addition to buying from other companies, social networks like LinkedIn, Instagram or Facebook. In this regard, various applications are not left out, but also, for example, the registration of customer, discount or loyalty cards, which require the transfer of a significant amount of information, although this is not inevitable for their functioning. All this, in combination with publicly available databases, can create a relatively faithful digital image.
What do personal information traders know about us?
Apart from the aforementioned birthday, address or perhaps religion, it is for example our job title, number of children and even hobbies or other interests. It is worth mentioning that even the often recommended anonymous browsing may not be completely effective in this regard. A VPN is offered here as a sure solution, but even that has its pros and cons. Regardless of how we browse the web, if we focus on the list of the most frequent information that can be linked to us in the database, they are:
- Name
- Phone Numbers
- Email addresses
- Age
- Birthdate
- Gender
- Residence and contact addresses
- Range of income
- Profession
- Children
- Hobbies
- Website browsing history
- Shopping history
- Education
- State of health
- and some others
In general, virtually all available data comes into focus, which can help the companies handling it subsequently to narrow down the preferences so that they fit as closely as possible into the user's profile for selecting products and services, or reveal as much as possible about the person in question, if it is a direct provision data and identification of the individual.
In this context, it is definitely worth thinking about what and how we share, especially on social networks, but also what permissions we grant, for example, to various applications that then track our location, contacts, can work with photos, and the like. Of course, this does not mean that we should all stop making contributions and practically make it impossible for selected types of software to function by denying them all access, but only to take a slightly more active and deliberate attitude towards these matters (if this is not already the case). Far from all applications that ask for it, it is inevitable that they, for example, consistently use location services, and it is also a question of how much we really want to reveal about ourselves and our family on our profiles and in how much detail.
To whom does the collected data go?
The goal is of course profit, from a certain point of view actually without any significant emphasis on who is interested. At the top, of course, are large companies, for whom every investment in advertising will pay off significantly more, because they will reach the right audience, with the same motivation, advertising agencies and in some cases even government organizations would be close behind. The price of our digital privacy is quite high, as this type of business is capable of generating hundreds of billions of dollars a year.
Let's imagine that you are in charge of a company whose products are aimed at expectant mothers. If you have the right information, it is not difficult to target potential customers very precisely based on web history, gender and age range, thanks to which you can be practically sure of the effectiveness of the spent advertising funds. Now you probably won't be surprised why after entering the query "first symptoms of pregnancy" (not only) in Google, you suddenly start coming across various discounts and specialized offers on cosmetics for children, nutrition or diapers. When you visit your doctor and pick up a prescription after finding symptoms of high blood pressure, you may start seeing ads for blood pressure lowering products as you browse the web.
It's a bit scarier considering that personal data traders aren't very picky about who they sell data to, when a major organization with a direct impact on people's daily lives comes into play, as happened, for example, in the United States, when the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) she bought the location data of millions of phones to determine whether Americans followed the restrictions in place during the COVID-19 pandemic. The evaluation of such a procedure is up to each individual, but it well demonstrates the power of personal information in practice.
Is data acquisition against regulations?
In the vast majority of cases, no, because we are made aware of it and agree to it through the terms of use statement, which we rarely pay due attention to. At the same time, however, the question is whether, even after a detailed study of all the messages contained in them, we would decide not to use the service or application. Again, it is appropriate to proceed sensibly and consider the benefits. We can, of course, wonder if the well-known statement that for all the wonderful possibilities that are available to us "for free" these days, we are not actually paying by providing information about ourselves...
What with this?
Although it may seem like a lost battle, if you don't want to put up with the situation, there are several options to at least somewhat defend against the collection of our personal information. Aside from some software tools, the most laborious and probably not entirely feasible is to request removal on a site-by-site basis. The risk of this procedure lies in the fact that, even if the request is respected, a refresh may occur when the database is updated from an external source. It is most effective to turn to experts who will take care of deleting the data and continuously monitor whether it has reappeared somewhere, but this means certain costs.
In any case, in today's Internet-connected world, something like absolute erasure or complete anonymity is not a realistic idea, in addition to a prudent approach to provision, classic procedures for choosing more complex passwords or two-factor authentication, the counterweight should be transparency and the possibility of control together with a high level of security.
I recommend looking at the NSA Utah data center site. You can watch absolutely everything and they themselves write on the website "if you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to fear". That says it all.
Parodies - they list it at the bottom of the pages.
So we didn't really learn anything...
But yes, they found out - the biggest deals with personal data (albeit anonymized) are made by the unmentioned Apple, then Facebook, Microsoft, TikTok and more…
Stupidity
How does the fact that a company has my anonymized data specifically harm me? As if I sometimes switch to read an article from letem světem Applem? Or that I don't see ads for bras, but for things I might be interested in?
When you go shopping in Globe, do you think that no one collects data about where you are? It's perfectly normal and perfectly fine. There's no need to make a fool of it. The biggest collector is an Android phone with a logged-in Google account, which most people carry in their pockets. So some approval or disapproval of annoying cookies is really the last thing.