My large digital footprint

The amount of information that is sent to various companies about me is insane. Collectively, they know everything in my life. What time do I wake up? What do I do after work? When do I sleep? For the most part, I’m okay with this information going out, as long as it is anonymous and it can’t come back to identify me. What I don’t like is how creepy it feels and makes me feel like I need to be more careful. What I do like is how companies anonymously use the data to make things better for me.

I don’t like it when I search something, I literally see the same thing I searched as an ad on Facebook. I understand why the business put the ad there, it is good in theory to show me what I didn’t end up purchasing to make me look at it again, but it feels creepy. It feels like invasion of privacy — enough that when I search for something controversial, I often go to incognito mode where they know nothing about me and can not re-target anything my way. Another reason I feel like this is invasion of privacy is because whenever I am just browsing the web with people around me, they can see my screen — which is fine, because I choose what I browse around people. What I do not choose are the ads that are shown — often time based on what I search or sites that I visit.

On the flip side of this, I think the data I am sending helps companies make things a lot better. For example, Google is collecting data from phones about traffic whenever people are driving, which is fine for me personally, because I would hate a world where GPS didn’t tell me about traffic accurately. I also would hate if companies made products and had to guess on how people are using their product and gave me updates on stuff I don’t care about.

Just please try to be less creepy when you feel like targeting individual users. Revealing what you know about people can be risky to user trust in the long run.