Double-edged Sword — Personal Information, Data and Privacy
Just as Sherlock Holmes can judge people's gender, height, weight and even some habits by their footprints, the digital footprints we leave on the Internet can also be collected and processed into our personal information. To a certain extent, those information have facilitated our lives, enabling these machines to adapt to our needs and habits. However, when those information are used for some other purposes, are our privacies still safe?
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Technical Support for Digital Footprint Processing
Suppose that you hover your mouse over an item while browsing an online shopping website for a long time. That may result in that on the next day, you will see a large number of advertisements for that kind of item on other websites.
Technically, the capture, collection and processing of digital footprints is feasible and not difficult for professionals. We are not talking deeply about how those really work in computer programming, but let’s check this site: http://clickclickclick.click. In this website, you can see that the movement, action of your mouse are all captured, that’s only the start. Actually, there’re 143 kinds of action that website can capture (If you have time, try to unlock them all! ). It’s almost certain that, for no matter what purposes, your behaviors on other websites can be easily captured intentionally.
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The value of our personal information
How Much Is our Data Worth? Have you ever thought about that your personal information one day becomes a product or a commodity? Who is going to buy them? How are they priced?
$240, this is the value of your personal information. How do we get that number? I quoted the methods and results from Wibson’s article,’How Much Is >Your< Data Worth? At Least $240 per Year. Likely Much More.’. In this article, they use Facebook as an example. By calculating the advertising revenue of Facebook, the number of active users, the total revenue of the U.S. electronic advertising industry and the proportion of Facebook, generally, we get the approximate value of personal information per capita.
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How do we protect our personal information
With sufficient motivation (the value of personal information) and technical support, it is hard to ensure that moral constraints are still strong. As online learners, how could we protect ourselves?
- Protect your passwords.
This is the most basic method, it can not prevent all kinds of information disclosure, but it is still not neglectable.
- Verify the web site you are on is safe
Pay attention to the security tips provided by browsers to avoid excessive operations on unsafe websites. At the same time, reading TOS will also help to understand the security of websites.
- Pause the automated backstage personal data collection service
Some services open automatically when you use a website or application. Most of them are for the purpose of improving the function of the application, but the possibility of information disclosure can not be ignored. The safest way is to close unnecessary services.
reference:
- Wibson(2018, January 18th), How Much Is >Your< Data Worth? At Least $240 per Year. Likely Much More., Retrieved from https://medium.com/wibson/how-much-is-your-data-worth-at-least-240-per-year-likely-much-more-984e250c2ffa