We are all in trouble:

How much is your private personal information worth? Unless you have been hiding under a rock or are living off of the grid, every major online media company knows everything about you. Possibly even more than you may know yourself. Companies like Facebook, Google, and Visa have spent untold millions building and deploying highly complex algorithms and tracking method with one goal in mind: to watch over your every move. Whether you are shopping or chatting with your friends, everything that you have ever done on the internet is carefully recorded.

Have you ever wondered what was really being recorded. Unfortunately that answer is Pandora’s Box considering the list and explanations would end of being a novel. However, here is a small list to give you a general idea of what you are giving up just by turning on your computer and opening your browser:

Exact Location

IP Address (personally identifiable by your ISP)

Who your ISP is

Browser Type

Type of computer

Type of mouse/keyboard

What site you are looking at

The topic and general idea of the site

How long you have been reading each page, where you stop on the page, and what parts of the page you have read

Where your cursor moves

What letters you type into your keyboard

Operating System

Your local time

Language

And much MUCH more..

This data is constantly run through these complex algorithms to make it possible for media companies, brands, retailers, utilities, and financial institutions to analyse you in a term called predictive analysis with the intended of guessing with a high degree of certainty how you personally will respond to various sales tactics, advertisements, and offers.

How long have you been tracked? No one really knows. The best anyone can guess is the beginning of the internet. If it can happen, it will. If there are opportunities for bad actors, they will come. What we do know is that technology has grown by leaps and bounds over the past 10 years and along with it computer software programs with the ability to analyze large amounts of data to come to a conclusion about a particular situation or even future events. Almost as if we were in a scifi movie, many of these complex algorithms are able to predict your ability to pay your bills on time or predict when you will be sick. Some have even successfully predicted pregnancy before a woman was aware.

It’s a dangerous game to play to give control over to a human made software for the purposes of predicting future actions, character, or motives. Imagine going to the bank and them denying you a bank account simply due to algorithms flagged your identity due to your online browsing habits, denying healthcare, or any other decision that you should personally have the right to made without judgement from data collected without your consent or knowledge.

First and foremost we must remember that these companies are not in the business of losing money but rather increasing their stake, power, and bottom line. If the shareholders are happy, no corporation that obtains your data really cares about the users that they steal information from. After your data is collected it is not only used for their own selfish personal gain but also sold off to the highest bidder in bulk in order to grow their revenue. This is repeated and repeated and repeated until the next thing that you know your personal information have been distributed between a dozen different companies and you have completely lost the ability to track who have your information and what they are doing with it.

Data collection have grown into a nasty intrusive world where anything goes, the profit margins are high, and the user is a pawn in the money-making scheme.