Personal Data Collection: The Complete WIRED Guide
1 min read
Summary
Large companies collect and use consumers’ data, sometimes without their knowledge or consent, in order to sell them products or services.
Examples of such data include social media posts, location data, and search-engine queries, which may be monetized in a different way to a user’s credit card number.
Data may also end up in the hands of academic researchers, hackers, law enforcement, foreign nations, and other companies trying to sell products.
Data brokers are another kind of business that gather, analyse and sell data about consumers without providing them with any services in return.
These companies may also buy data from retail stores, as well as users’ medical records and browsing history, and even their social media connections and online purchases.
Data brokers are valuable resources for stalkers and abusers and are only lightly regulated in some US states.
The use of personal data by artificial intelligence researchers to train their automated programs is also a key development that needs to be considered.
Furthermore, the future of personal data collection, and whether consumers should own their own data and be paid when it is used, is likely to become a hot topic in the future.