For me, the most frightening thing about Cybulski's article is user complicity in our own vulnerability. Companies such as Google and Facebook mine our data. Knowing this, we still post where we are, what we are eating, our likes and dislikes, our political lean, etc for all to see. From our text messages (Google hangouts) to our emails (gmail), all of this data is kept and monitored. Our obsession with connectivity feeds our obsession with keeping track of our whole life, making it only too easy for our personal information to be stored and disseminated to the unknown. Cybulski describes Microsoft's ability to force its users to be on the scoreboard, leaving no choice of opting out. Similarly, through using social media that tracks our every movement (that we openly post), we are giving ourselves no choice to opt out of data mining. The very things that should scare us (Facebook automatically tagging your face in a photo you did not know was being taken, by someone you do not know *this truly happened to me*) are what keeps us engaged. We are amazed by the convenience of having all our photos organized, without questioning why it is so easy for the software to recognize our face, sometimes better than we recognize it ourselves.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ozeszesBXJM
It is users like us who make these companies so powerful.
I think the truth in this post is scary on two levels. On one hand, it is scary that we've become rather complacent in our information being mined and utilized by corporations. We do indeed continue to put a lot of our personal information online, knowing that it will be used by websites and advertisers. We also know that this information will be seen by others, just as we seek other people's information.
ReplyDeleteOn the other hand, and I find this a little more scary, is the sheer power of these entities and the thoroughness in which our information is sought out and used. The other day, I was using a private browser to use Facebook and I was researching a product on Walmart's website (power line adaptors). That same evening, on my Facebook feed there was an advertisement for Walmart. What shocked me was that it wasn't a generic Walmart ad. It actually contained the exact product that I had been looking at - same model, brand, and price. It's unsettling that on some level, there really is no way to "opt out" of our information being mined. It seems like that would require us to stop using the Internet all together.. or at least learn more sophisticated ways of hiding our usage.