Watch Out! Your Data Has Been Compromised
Your data is the most valuable asset companies care about. Why? Because they can make money off of selling your personalized data. Whenever you create an account for a service or website such as Facebook, you need to agree to their terms and conditions in order to create your account. As soon as you click the create account button, companies will start collecting data you produce during your screen time. They will then have the option to share your data to third parties for use whether we like it or not.
Whenever I check my personal email, I frequently receive both promotional emails from companies I have never interacted with, and spam emails from sketchy websites. Personally, I find promotional emails quite bothersome and it doesn’t help that the emails are coming from random sources. Though my email address used to create an account is public data for the companies, is it really ethical for them to sell my data to third parties?
In Critical Questions For Big Data, boyd and Crawford state, “Just because content is publicly accessible does not mean that it was meant to be consumed by just anyone.” Even though I have given my email to the companies to create an account myself, I believe it’s not ethical to give out my data to other companies for use. If companies are sharing your email address to third parties, who knows what other data they’re sharing? It’s alarming to think about how all the searches you made from Google and the posts you have posted on Facebook can be processed into data in which those companies can share to third parties. Do you think it’s okay for companies to share your information with others without proper consent?
