How Tech Giants Are Using Your Data
Big data is a collection of data that may be assessed to disclose patterns and trends. Several multinational companies use it to filter the data and business of various companies. Many multi-level companies collect consumer data which they then use to give a more user-friendly experience and improve their algorithms, which in turn help make the company more profitable. Types of data collected by them are -
- Personal data. This category includes personally identifiable information such as Social Security numbers and gender, as well as non-personally identifiable information, including your IP address, web browser cookies, and device IDs (which both your laptop and mobile device have).
- Engagement data. This type of data details how consumers interact with a business’s website, mobile apps, text messages, social media pages, emails, paid ads, and customer service routes.
- Behavioral data. This category includes transactional details such as purchase histories, product usage information (e.g., repeated actions), and qualitative data (e.g., mouse movement information).
- Attitudinal data. This data type encompasses metrics on consumer satisfaction, purchase criteria, product desirability, and more.
META
Meta collects a lot of data about you — everything from your email address to the strength of your phone’s battery. Meta meticulously scrutinizes the details of its users’ online lives, and its tracking stretches far beyond the company’s well-known targeted advertisements. Details that people often readily volunteer — age, employer, relationship status, likes, and location — are just the start. Meta tracks both its users and nonusers on various sites and apps. It collects biometric facial data without users’ explicit “opt-in” consent.
WHAT DOES META KNOW ABOUT YOU?
Apart from Google, Meta is probably the only company with this high level of detailed customer information. The more users who use Meta, the more information they amass. Heavily investing in its ability to collect, store, and analyze data, Meta does not stop there. Apart from analyzing user data, Meta has other ways of determining user behavior.
1. Tracking cookies: Meta tracks its users across the web using tracking cookies. If a user is logged into Meta and simultaneously browses other websites, Meta can track the sites they are visiting.
2. Facial recognition: One of Meta’s latest investments has been in facial recognition and image processing capabilities. Meta can track its users across the internet and other Meta profiles with image data provided through user sharing.
3. Tag suggestions: Meta suggests whom to tag in user photos through image processing and facial recognition.
4. Analyzing Likes: A recent study conducted showed that it is viable to predict data accurately on a range of personal attributes that are highly sensitive just by analyzing a user’s Meta Likes. Research conducted at Cambridge University and Microsoft Research shows how the patterns of Meta Likes can very accurately predict your satisfaction with life, intelligence, emotional stability, alcohol or drug use, relationship status, age, gender, and political views — among many others.
WHAT HAPPENS TO THIS DATA?
Meta tracks you as you browse online. Using artificial intelligence to analyze your behavior, meta can learn almost anything about you. That knowledge turns out to be perfect both for advertising and propaganda. Meta is a market leader, and its stockpiling of personal data is at the core of its $40.6 billion annual business. Meta uses several software tools to do this tracking. When internet users drift to other sites, Meta can still monitor what they are doing with software like its ubiquitous “Like” and “Share” buttons and something called Meta Pixel — an invisible code that’s dropped onto other websites to allow Meta to track users’ activity. Will Meta ever prevent itself from learning people’s political views or other sensitive facts about them?
AMAZON
From selling books out of Jeff Bezos’s garage to a global conglomerate with a yearly revenue topping $400bn (£290bn), much of the monstrous growth of Amazon has been fueled by its customers’ data. Continuous analysis of customer data determines, among other things, prices, suggested purchases, and what profitable own-label products Amazon chooses to produce. The 200 million users are Amazon’s most valuable customer data source. The more amazon services used, such as Amazon Prime, Amazon Shopping, Amazon Echo, Amazon Dot, Ring Doorbell, Kindle E-reader, etc., can infer the kind of person you are. The firm’s software is so accomplished at the prediction that third parties can hire its algorithms as a service called Amazon Forecast.
WHAT DOES AMAZON KNOW ABOUT YOU?
Amazon can collect your name, address, searches, and recordings whenever you talk to an Amazon assistant. Meanwhile, cookie trackers are used on the website to enhance the shopping experience. Amazon Alexa, echo and echo dot listen to all the conversations in a room. When this data was requested, there was a shocking revelation of the number of voice messages that were saved.
WHAT HAPPENS TO THIS DATA?
Some of this data is used for “personalization” and improving the user experience. However, using this data, amazon can predict where you work, where you spend your leisure time, your family and friends, and their shopping requirements using the amazon wish list. At the same time, if you use Amazon Music, Prime, and Fire TV, the algorithm will know your political, social, economic, and religious status. If Amazon is used to store photos, it can send geological tags, device information, location, or attributes of other objects in the image. Amazon Kindle, an e-reader, can collect data, revealing a lot about your thoughts, preferences, beliefs, and feelings. In 2020, a BBC investigation showed how every motion detected by its Ring doorbells, and each interaction with the app is stored, including the model of phone or tablet and mobile network used. Ring can share your stored data with law enforcement if you consent or a warrant is issued.
Thus, Amazon as a service shares a lot of data and can predict or persuade your next payment or purchase, and the algorithm is just getting stronger each year to expect more about your life.
NETFLIX
Netflix is a company that is built on data. It collects data about what you view and how long you watch it. Combined with the streaming service’s vast extensive data analytics capabilities, it’s why Netflix is so good at offering recommendations for what to watch next. More widely, Netflix’s data-driven programming helps to inform the TV shows it commissions. Every data point that Netflix collects says something about the user, which helps strengthen the algorithm and predict your next potential watch. It helps give better recommendations, and customers end up watching more hours of content, enabling Netflix to keep users attracted for extended periods. It also tracks the shows users have stopped watching to improve its future recommendations.
WHAT DOES NETFLIX KNOW ABOUT YOU?
● Netflix collects data, including device identifiers, geo-location, browser type, and other details are given to sign up, such as email address and payment information. If Netflix is being used as an app, it collects cookies and web beacons to gain knowledge about your interest.
● Netflix has files of data per person, which knows the model of the device being used and the account demographic information such as age and gender. However, it does not use this into account as a part of the decision-making process. Netflix also keeps track of the viewing habits of each customer.
WHAT HAPPENS TO THIS DATA?
● Netflix also knows your viewing habits. The streaming service will log that you binged every episode of a particular TV show in a week and that you abandoned another TV Show 20 minutes in. This sort of data is core to the personalization Netflix prides itself on — the resulting recommendations based on what other people like you have watched. It is all done via specialist personalization algorithms fueled by data about the films and TV you watch and how you interact with the service.
● Netflix does not sell ads or member information or engage in third-party advertising. However, it does share your data with TV or internet service providers, streaming media device providers, and voice assistant platform providers.
There are limited controls for Netflix data collection, but in the end, it’s up to you to decide whether it’s worth it to use the service, especially with the amount of privacy it compromises on.
Google collects data about how you use its devices, apps, and services. This ranges from location history, google searches, online purchases, and anything else that was done on the browser. Google Home and Google Assistant are being used to listen to more than just requests or playing music, but entire conversations which get backed up recorded on Google’s databases. Google knows more about a user than any other company in the world, primarily because of its number of services and the way its apps are linked. Gmail, which is an entity of google, has an email id, which is used as a sign-in to most apps and websites, thus giving Google to track more data than ever about a user and his experience.
WHAT DOES GOOGLE KNOW ABOUT YOU?
With all the data that Google collects about a user across all its platforms, it is used to build a detailed advertising profile that includes your gender, age range, job industry, and interests. This helps them send targeted ads that align with your interests. Location tracking is another demographic that gets measured. The more data, the better the quality of the service. Google uses all the data it collects to improve usability — and your information alone can’t do all the work. Google also analyzes billions of other people’s data across different apps to make its services more useful for everyone.
WHAT HAPPENS TO THIS DATA?
But Google does use your data to help advertisers and third parties show people relevant and targeted ads on Google products, on partner websites, and in mobile apps? According to Google Safety Centre, they might use the information without identifying you personally, including your Google searches, location history, websites and apps, videos or ads you’ve seen, and other personal data like your age or gender. The kind of data Google collects includes:
● The language(s) you speak.
● The things you buy and your spending budget.
● The places you look up in Google Maps and where you’ve been.
● Your favorite shops, especially if you link your rewards cards to Google Pay.
● Everything in your inbox — all your emails, attachments, and even the stuff you mark as spam or delete.
● Everything you save in your Google Drive — work documents, purchase receipts, photos, videos, and so on.
● Your YouTube viewing habits, including everything you’ve ever watched, any comments you’ve ever left, and anything you’ve ever searched for.
● What your upcoming schedule looks like (and everything you’ve done in your Google Calendar).
● The apps you open (if you’re using Android) and when you open them.
● The questions you ask your Google Assistant.
● All the articles you read on Google News.
● All the ads you view and click on (if they were shown to you through Google services, partner websites, or mobile apps).
While Google collects a lot of data about you and benefits from the user profiles it creates to sell digital ad space and demographic data, it has a business incentive to maintain your privacy and stay compliant with regulations that protect consumers.
APPLE
Apple has promoted its user-focused privacy stance heavily, partly to provide a market difference between itself and Amazon, Google, and Meta, among other companies with varying levels of competition. But it generally plays out that Apple tries to give itself access to the least amount of information about you and the least amount of your private information it can. In some cases, Apple doesn’t interact with data at all; in some, it only provides device-based results and never has access to the data via its services or centrally; in others, it openly admits what it uses. It may give you the ability to disable its use of it. Apple has a rather complicated relationship with privacy, which it always points to as a differentiator with Google. But delivering on it is a different tale.
WHAT DOES APPLE KNOW ABOUT YOU?
● Purchase Trust Score — Apple tracks your use of your devices, including “the approximate number of phone calls or emails you send and receive,” in scoring whether a given purchase is legitimate to prevent fraud.
● Apple Pay — It does show your Apple Card transactions, which it manages in association with the credit card issuer.
● Health — Health data is stored on the device and encrypted. While you can back it up (securely), you can’t sync Health data across devices.
● Maps — You might notice Maps remembers where you parked your car. Does it share that with Apple? No. It’s all generated on your device only.
● Messages — Apple has no access to the content of your messages, which uses encryption for sending and receiving messages from other people and syncing across your devices.
● Significant Locations — Your iPhone or iPad keeps tracking the places you visit that it thinks are “significant”, according to an algorithm Apple doesn’t disclose.
WHAT HAPPENS TO THIS DATA?
Apple sells ads as well, on a far smaller scale as compared to Google and Microsoft. These appear in the News app and App Store, based on your interests. By default, on the iPhone, you’ve allowed Apple to serve you ads based on what it thinks are your interests. Many users have bought Apple devices explicitly because of the company’s privacy approaches, including pushing back on law enforcement requests to access user data.
Fortunately for Apple’s marketing people, “privacy” is the ultimate undefinable term because every user views it differently.
As we progress and more customers move into the digital and tech space, we realize that data is much more private. As much as we give data to big tech companies, we understand that it is, in turn, fueling the algorithm, and thus we’re ourselves working to diminish our authority. The industry has moved to where sharing data — albeit anonymized and aggregated — is the norm. However, it is also our responsibility to scrutinize the amount of data being given and if the various apps we are using are justified to make our lives easier.
Author: Urja Shah
A second-year student at Manipal Institute of Technology
