Joel Stein plays everyman in Time magazine’s March 10 cover story entitled Data Mining: How Companies Now Know Everything About You.
He allows data mining companies to tell what they think they know about him, and the result is eerie preciseness that is both strikingly right and howlingly wrong.
Companies glean this information from everyday life — what we buy, where we buy it, from words we use in emails or online searches, etc. Those digital datacrumbs build a footprint of you — and that footprint is sold for fractions of a penny to deliver ads and information tailored to you.
As Stein notes, the loss of privacy may be “not such a bad return” if it leads to better information — and may not be all that invasive, since marketers only care about slight chunks of information about you.
But as Stein also notes, there’s also a level of creepiness – and very few rules about what marketers can and cannot do with that information. While Congress considers tighter rules, companies such as Google and Facebook face criticism with how they use your data they’ve collected and how third-parties also use that data.
Too much invasion of privacy, or a reasonable trade?