I feel like everyone cares about data privacy nowadays except me.
So with all this Facebook thing on going, the other companies are discreetly trying to clean up their own stuff now. Just received a notification from Twitter today to tell me they updated my control over privacy settings and I should review it to see what I would share and wouldn't share.
Average person: Oh my goodness look at all the data they have of me. They even know what apps I have! UNCHECK EVERY BOX NO ONE SHALL HAVE MY DATA!
Me: Ooo they can even do that? That's so cool. I'm gonna leave all of them on. Okay maybe I'll take out the location one but doesn't really matter.
Then there's this part where you can view your data.
Average person: *opens apps* THEY KNOW EVERYTHING *opens interests* THEY REALLY KNOW EVERYTHING. THEY KNOW MORE ABOUT ME THAN I DO ABOUT MYSELF.
Me: Huh 43 linked devices? Better investigate that, thanks for letting me know. Hmm wow 62 advertisers are interested in me cool, omigosh there's a button that lets me request for advertiser list and they send it to my email, let's click on that. OOO hearthstone, airbnb, uber, scoot, tableau... yo SG property guru sorry I know I was finding info about property but it was for my project haha you got the wrong guy. Oh hey interests, woooowww did they do some topic modelling on text analytics to determine what my interests are. Okay some of these interests are so far off though what's with all the sporty stuff. But hey, they got some specific interests of mine right. They know me well! Yay!
Yea.
I mean, I get why many people are concerned. It feels strange and perhaps creepy that some organisation knows so much about you.
I guess there are 3 main reasons why I am so cool with all of these.
1) I think targeted advertising is amazing actually. I know you can abuse it and so nonsense like election interference but I mean people find ways to abuse things all the time. I just know that ads have always been annoying to me because so many of them are irrelevant, but ever since targeted advertising became a thing, I appreciate that ad quality has improved and if they're going to spam me with advertisements, they're at least things that I am more likely to care about nowadays. I mean dude, I hardly get any fashion stuff anymore, but I get food and fun stuff. That's great. Also, I guess I probably will be doing this in some way or another in my job in the future too?
2) I think many people don't realise how data is utilised. Okay so I think it would be creepy if all my data was identifiable to me. Then if someone I knew started working at the company, they could pull up my data and read all about me. That would be weird. But I know from experience of working with data, that's not how it works. My name will be converted into some hashed ID number and it sits there as the most useless column in your data set except when you need to link the info back or merge with another data set. So someone (or an AI) decides that I like dota. So they create that as my interest and now advertisers can select 'people who are interested in dota'. Through this whole process, no human actually knows who is this guy that likes dota. They just know ID dkt294t3h-24,fds# likes dota. And the system that feeds the ad to that ID. The way this works, I don't feel like it's an issue at all. But well, I do think that it's great that it's being discussed now because laws should be put in place to determine what should and should not be allowed, because even if most tech companies use data like this now, if there are no regulations it means not all have to do so.
3) I just find the whole thing really fascinating. Like how do they even get all these data. Machine learning is surely employed to categorise people and their interests. Especially when they have to do text mining, handling text data is so tricky. How does that look like internally? What cool stuff can they do next? How can they further improve accuracy?
So, I guess I'm a little different from the average person.
I guess it comes from my marketing and data analytics background. Seriously, access to data for analytics and tools for precise targeting are so amazing for a marketer. Digital data is so much better than consumer surveys since it's so fast and it often gives more accurate information since people can't describe themselves well. And if as a marketer I am trying to add value to you by giving you the things that you want, then your data helps me to understand what is it that you want, without you necessarily knowing that you want it and very importantly without you having to specially come to tell me about it.
That's great isn't it.
---