Privacy as a Currency
Privacy; the current currency
Augmented intelligence as good as it comes to personalize our lives and make them better demands much of our privacy in exchange. Are there limits to it?
Sometimes we claim that we are all about being private and all (even our instagram account is private) but what we do on the internet diminishes the former — the privacy paradox.
Hold on. It’s not that it’s your fault anyway, the majority of us are caught up unconsciously.
At the moment, the most persuasive explanation of it is what psychologists call “privacy calculus”, the idea that social media users understand the tradeoff between losing privacy and the benefits they get from using services that undermine it and regard the latter as outweighing the former.
The demographic variable has been proven to have minor weight to predict any weak privacy comportment –it cuts across. Yet, the companies that do this continue to reap huge revenues as we use and popularize their services. Like “Hey give me all your data, and that’s not it, you will continue to give me more of your data on millisecond installments then you get to use my services for free” — my privacy is really the currency huh!!
Imagine going home after work tired and drained by the hot scorching sun then you think a soda could relieve some of your thirst and drained-body distresses. Promptly a beverage hawker pops up to request you to buy one. At the moment it seems overly obvious to you that the sun is hot and all kinds of cold drinks vendors will try to sell to people along the busy town streets. It passes you that you “hashtag” tweeted a soda would slap well right now. This is the twist of it What if the stranger (hawker) knows you and (you don’t) saw the tweet acted promptly by proposing to sell to you.
That’s how the internet works while you are just minding your business and running your day as usual, in the background algorithm models does data mining and makes sense of your data by “cookie” -ing you. Selling you to advertising companies according to the data analyzed by state-of-the-art machine models. Actually, you are auctioned. The auction theory-based algorithms do the job, It places ads for the best demographic the advertiser’s money can buy. If you are 100% likely to buy a Coke the highest bidder gets you, and symmetrically decreases as the price of the ad goes down.
Natural language processing, text mining, and object recognition models tag them all really do a pronounced job in data mining. Through object recognition companies can tell what kind of clothes and jewelry you like and use that to gauge your spending ability and class. This is possible, when you upload a picture the model captures and does object recognition on what you have worn pairs it with its price in its database, and ultimately it is added as data points to your profile. Through that, they know what ads to place on your feed and wall. Natural language processing comes using psychology as a weapon. The models can read all your messages, comments, and captions and find patterns that dictate a certain behavior to sway you to some degree.
Social media platforms are not free, if you are not paying for it, then you are the product and those paying for it are the customers. Products (you) are manufactured differently and are sold to different customers. The work of the platforms is to ensure that the product (you) stays there long enough for the customer to find you there. This is attained through monopolizing your attention through “personalized algorithms”. That brings to your feed whatever you like and find entertaining and even predicts what you would love through recommendation systems. Some of which are 99.01% accurate depending on the geek running things in the background.
Soon they are going to learn how to cookie people all over the physical world too, and I think it's freaking from a privacy point of view. I sympathize, there’s a creepy side to the word “personalization”. Its frightening affront to our personal freedom. While I’ve got to live my work-a-day life, there will be companies tracking me that will be dedicated to getting me to do one thing, like opening a betting account or drinking a Coke. It’ll be data-driven asymmetric warfare. They have my data. They know my issues-financial, personal, etc. Their models will know how to target me. They can pull my strings creating an augmented reality for me.
Data has become the most valuable commodity on earth surpassing oil unfortunately your freedom is violated in exchange. Why would a game app want to get permission to read my messages on installation? Seriously a game? This substantiates why technology establishments are leading among the fortune 500 companies.
Facebook just released new terms and conditions that allow them to use one’s WhatsApp data on their other services. Do they want to make a “personalized” world for its users or just make microtargeting marketing more efficient than ever at the cost of our privacy?
It all comes down to a matter of legal protection and whatnot.
Lets continue the conversation at the comment section and across my socials.
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