Ignore the use of your digital data at your peril: today’s personal data businesses are profiling you in ways that could have a profound impact on your life.
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| Brain light/Alamy |
WE HAVE all been there. Aimlessly wandering around online when an ad for, say, the perfect pair of hiking boots pops up. Just in time for that long walk you have been planning. No surprise there, perhaps: we are used to our digital lives being tracked, sold and used to entice us with stuff. But these days – as you can read about in our feature “Nowhere to hide: Data harvesters came for your privacy – and found it” – the spookily accurate ads are just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to how much insight companies have about our lives.
The modern personal data business is an impenetrable tangle of cunning harvesting tricks, location tracking, collation, analysis, profiling, selling and reselling that is worth about £150 billion a year. We may be tempted to ignore or dismiss all of this, perhaps even to be thankful that it at least makes ads relevant and often useful. But when that data could be used to judge whether we exercise regularly and eat healthily in order to price our health insurance, or to determine our personality style and therefore our suitability for a job, or even to track menstrual cycles to inform the police of potential illegal abortions, then surely we should be shocked out of our apathy.
The truth is that big technology companies thrive on timely data. After Apple changed the rules regarding how apps could track iPhone users in 2021, Facebook said the move would cost it around $10 billion in 2022 alone. So action can still help to curb the problem.
The US will soon introduce privacy legislation that demands companies tell users when their data is being harvested. The EU is also working on new data privacy rules. Even China – where the state itself excels at online surveillance – has set strict rules on how companies can collect and use personal data.
We must play our part too by educating ourselves about which apps and websites are syphoning off information and considering whether that is an equitable trade-off for the services they provide. Because once our data is made available for sale, there is little limit to how others may decide to use it.
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