Are you betrayed by the data？
On my birthday, I received a lot of blessings from short messages, including my credit card bank, my insurance company, the airline I often fly on, and so on. What surprises me is that many companies that I don’t know about have also sent birthday greetings. These blessings did not make me happy but increased my worries. How did they get my private information? Of course, there are many people who are as worried as me. They are all over the world, but our concerns are similar. The reasons for our data leakage are similar. In an era when social media such as Facebook, Twitter, and TikTok are deeply involved in our lives, how to protect our data has attracted more and more attention.
In 2019, at least 30 organizations — including coffee chain Dunkin’ and cloud provider Rubrik — experienced major data breaches. Most recently, Dow Jones saw over 2.4M identity records, including those of politicians and government officials, leak across the internet. Not only these organizations but Facebook, Google, and Amazon, which are closer to our lives and social life, cannot avoid the leakage of user information. People use these social media to show their lives and build wider connections with friends and community members. At the same time, users also pay great attention to protecting their privacy. They do not want to be harassed by targeted marketing and spam.
People have been trusting big firms such as Google and Facebook with their data for years. They have offered their location data to Google and information about their preferences to Facebook so they can be targeted with so-called ‘personalized’ advertising. But these companies are proving that they can not be trusted with people’s data. As we know，Facebook, Google and Amazon now are some of the richest and most powerful companies in the world and are increasingly coming under attack for how they use consumer data and what they allow to be said on their platforms. These practices must arouse our great concern. They are already collecting user data as much as possible and using big data algorithms to target advertisements to users to achieve their commercial marketing purposes. At the same time, data leakage is a direct threat to users’ information security.
For example, Facebook admitted a massive data breach affecting over 50 million people in 2018. Of course, this wasn’t the first time Facebook had seen a breach of user data. This was a scandal that Google was all too aware of when it discovered its Google+ social network had exposed data in March 2018. between 2015 and March 2018, outside developers would have been able to potentially access personal Google+ profile data due to a software glitch in the site.
Although Amazon hasn’t had nearly the problems with data breaches that have hit some of the other big tech brands.
The bigger story of 2018 for Amazon was fears around the possibility that Echo home speakers were recording conversations through Alexa and sending them to other users.
It can be said that the leakage of user information has become unbearable for users. Then, the misuse of user information by big firms hurts users deeply. Except for Apple and Microsoft, it is easy to find that these big companies do not produce and sell their own products. They collect a large amount of user data and comments that can be regarded as valuable by them and then form customer portraits thorough background analysis. Then use big data to target users to place advertisements, and finally sell products. Therefore, safeguarding our information security has become particularly urgent. In response, many governments have begun to formulate policies to deal with this problem.
The “General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR)” promulgated in Europe caused many Internet companies around the world to rewrite their privacy policies.
The California Consumer Privacy Act of 2018, numbered AB375, also opened the process of US data privacy legislation.
In addition, in the Investigation of Competition In Digital Markets, it is also pointed out that each platform now serves as a gatekeeper over a key channel of distribution. By controlling access to markets, these giants can pick winners and losers. Yes, what they allow to be said on their platforms is determined by them, and what users see is only what they want users to see. And all of these serve the business purpose behind them to get the most profit.
We already trust big firms such as Google, Facebook, and Amazon too much. These tech giants track our behavior, store our financial information, know where we work and live, what we buy. They know our location through Google Maps, know our favorite books through Amazon consumption records, and know through our posts Who are we dating? Through our comments and the candidates we follow, they know our political orientation. One day, they will also know that we gave birth to a girl, store all her photos in the cloud, and know that she likes pink Barbie. And understand all the information in her life as she grows as they know us, and regularly advertise to her by analyzing her growth path. Until one day, we will find that it is not us who knows her best, but the data stored in the cloud by these big firms that can be repeatedly analyzed and utilized by them. Well, this will not be the wonderful world we expect.
