We currently live in an era where information exchange is becoming everything. The collection of our data is a continuous process that gives businesses and marketers superior information on our behaviour, social class, purchasing preferences and even personal things like our political affiliations and sexual orientation. In fact, most human activity elicits some sort of information or another. Purchase history’s, online profiles, website views and “likes” on Facebook all reveal information about ourselves. More often than not, we are completely unaware of what information we make available to others.

Data scientists and business analytics specialists working for retail firms have become experts in analysing customers’ consumption patterns. Some of their forecasts in human behaviour are seemingly invasive. (Hill 2012) reported that retail giant, Target, had been able use consumption data to determine whether a woman is with child before she needs to start buying the essential items for her baby. While it isn’t illegal for businesses to use information available in the public domain, it certainly invades ones privacy. In one such instance, Target was guilty of exposing a girl’s parents of her pregnancy through mail and coupon advertising sent to the family’s home (Lubin 2012).

Kosinski, Stillwell et al. (2013) conducted an experiment to find out which “liking” behaviour was most indicative of intelligence in subjects. The item that was most indicative of intelligence was that of curly fries. Despite the food having no logical connection with intelligence, the findings were backed up through the process of homophily (individuals bond with other individuals similar to themselves). What this meant was that the subconscious effort of liking an arbitrary page on Facebook such as curly fries, meant that that information miners would be able to identify you as intelligent. This has glaring implications, especially in the practice of recruitment.

Golbeck (2013) warns that recruitment firms are already using information such as this to determine a person’s likelihood of being an alcoholic or using drugs. Mention has even been made of the fact that people who use Facebook are actually the product and not the customer because they provide the data and information that is then sold off to businesses.

So how can we combat this? Is there a way forward to protect the type of information we broadcast about ourselves? It has been proposed that notification alerts should be displayed before submitting information and “liking” content online. It would explain the risk of revealing certain type’s information online. Another option is the use of data encryption which would render data useless for companies looking to exploit it. Despite the public’s’ reservations about this method of data gathering, this new and profitable method is unlikely to change anytime soon.

References

GOLBECK, J., 2013. The curly fry conundrum: why social media “likes” say more than you might think. 3 edn. Mid Atlantic: TED.

HILL, K., 2012. How Target figured out a teen girl was pregnant before her father did. 3 edn. New York: Forbes.

KOSINSKI, M., STILLWELL, D. and GRAEPEL, T., 2013. Private traits and attributes are predictable from digital records of human behavior. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 110(15), pp. 5802-5805.

LUBIN, G., 2012. The incredible story of how Target exposed a teen girls pregnancy. 13 edn. New York: Business Insider.