Information Privacy

In this chapter, our textbook goes into detail about information privacy, including the benefits, harms, and different ways information technology interact with privacy

The movie shows just how much social media tracks users. According to one interviewer, “They know what you're looking at, how long you're looking at it" [1]. Everything on the internet is tracked. This includes what websites a person is going to, how long they spend on them, how frequently, anything that they can track. They can access GPS data and see who is on a person’s friend list. Altogether, social media companies and other companies on the internet can gather a lot of data on a person.

One point that the movie hammers home is “if you're not paying for the product, you are the product" [1]. What this means is that since users do not pay for social media, another entity is. In the case of social media, that is the advertisers. Internet services that are “free” are paid for by advertisers, who are paying the websites to put advertisements on their website. Since users are not paying for the product, their attention is the product being sold to advertisers.

Companies collect data from their users to build models of their user base. They use these models to target advertisements more effectively. Machine learning algorithms require a lot of data to be effective, so companies want to collect as much data as possible. While the data isn’t necessarily sold—in the movie, the interviewers discuss that data is a valuable resource companies don’t want to give to competitors—the companies are still collecting data and tracking users. These models can predict things that seem completely unrelated to the data they are collecting, such as when Target’s models predicted whether a woman was pregnant with astonishing accuracy [2]. The data they are collecting might seem innocuous, the information they can figure out from the data can be very invasive.

According to the movie, even the results on Google are targeted like advertisements. Google search suggestions are based on a variety of factors, such as geographic data, search history, interests, and political leaning. An example given in the movie is that the search “global warming” could have search suggestions “global warming is fake” or “global warming is real” based on a variety of factors. It is not the same suggestions to every user.

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