Alexa and 23andMe — The Next Political Nightmare in the Making

People are unwilling to learn from past experiences and continue to believe their data is safe.

When Edward Snowden’s revelations broke — I was sure this was the end of the internet as we had known it. But protest died down after a while. The government had found ways to tap into the wealth of information people provide about themselves — but the concerns about that were tame at best. Maybe that was because everyone had suspected this for a while. Sure, there were probably people listening to your phone calls if you mentioned certain words. IT was surely ill-advised to google certain terms, even if it was just for fun or research.

However, the Cambridge Analytica scandal and the use of data to manipulate elections seemed to really rattle people. But what has changed? Nothing apparently. People were initially shocked and seemed to have understood that data -information about themselves — once out there, cannot be safely stored. It is hard to protect and usually will in some way be used by other parties, for purposes difficult to predict.

While I was personally slightly confused as to why people were entirely fine with advertisers using their personal data for customized messaging — it seemed that people were genuinely afraid of the implications and capacity of data when used in a…