Mining Your Life for Their Profit

[marmar]

from In These Times:


Mining Your Life for Their Profit
A behind-the-screens look at how Internet giants sell your personal information.

BY SUSAN J. DOUGLAS


With all the furor over the revelations about the NSA’s spying and its massive overreach in collecting our data, another big spying scandal has gotten less attention: the massive corporate culling—and selling—of our personal information to, basically, other corporations. We now live in the era of Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Instagram and Foursquare, where millions of us willingly share personal information, rendering old notions of privacy obsolete. And now, many are turning a blind eye as corporations become increasingly cavalier about obtaining the information we don’t actively volunteer. The lengthy, jargon-ridden nature of most sites’ privacy statements means that many people don’t bother to read them before clicking “accept.”

Yes, there have been stories about Facebook and Google collecting and selling our personal information, but mostly on the business pages. How many of us really understand the extent of this? And how much more invasive and creepy is it going to get, given the enormous pressures on a behemoth like Facebook to boost its stock prices after the miserable failure of its IPO?

Google recently argued in a court filing that its users should have “no legitimate expectation of privacy” when sending emails through its system, meaning Google asserts that it can scan and read your emails to better determine what ads might be targeted to you. My mail carrier can’t legally open my personal mail, but Google sure thinks it can. Here’s what Google admits it may be collecting: your mobile phone information, including friends’ phone numbers and how long you talk to them, what you search for and look at online, what physical locations you are at, and the number and kinds of apps you use. In March, Google admitted in a $7 million settlement with 37 states that during its “Street View” mapping project, the cars cruising around cities also secretly vacuumed up passwords, e-mail and even medical and financial records from unsuspecting Wi-Fi users.

Then there’s Facebook. OK, so it may be our own fault if we post that drunken picture from our last vacation. And we probably accept that Facebook mines everything we post—our friendship networks, the links we share, our political beliefs, our “likes” and “dislikes.” But in February, Facebook entered into a deal with four companies that collect data about our spending habits, like what we buy in the drug store and supermarket, our web browsing records, and even divorce and other court and financial records. Facebook can now be privy to activities you never share on the site, allowing them to target just the right ads to you on the totally annoying righthand side of your news feed. The FTC is currently investigating two of the companies Facebook has partnered with, Acxiom and Datalogics, to ascertain just how they collect all their data. .....................(more)

The complete piece is at: http://inthesetimes.com/article/15607/mining_your_life_for_their_profit/

[xchrom]

1. du rec.

[malaise]

2. I've been asking about this for ages

Rec

[Nuclear Unicorn]

3. Who needs data-mining, marketing analyses and advertising when you can just get a

government mandate for people to purchase your crap or go to jail?