Have you already heard of personas? Basically, a persona is your digital you, providing information about your online behaviour, personal information as well as preferences. In short, a persona is your data-driven Doppelgänger or twin if you may say so. Sounds scary? I assume it does. While we are entering our personal data as well as displaying our shopping behaviour online all day long, companies are collecting this data in order to create profiles that represent segments of real people in a population (Pruitt & Grudin, 2003). It begins with our shopping search on Amazon and ends with our daily activities absorbed by Alexa. The information gathered can be anything depending on what information you agree to be collected and what is legal according to the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). However, the question is not really what information is gathered, but more what information is not.
So, what is the use? The idea is to collect user data in order to create personalized marketing and to predict consumer purchase behaviour. This enables more targeted marketing and consumer recommendations (Salminen et al., 2018). You probably remember at least one situation where you were shown previously searched shopping items on a different website or social media channel. I had it a few times that Facebook would display items I just looked at the other day, adding recommendations to it that would fit my taste. While this probably does not even worry many people, the question to ask is where this will lead in the future if we are already at this point. Personalized and targeted shopping is one thing, but a persona knowing everything about you and eventually taking life decisions for you is another.
How does your future persona look like? Or better, how will it be different from you? I do not think that anyone is still actively thinking about the information he or she discloses. People do not make conscious decisions anymore about what personal information to share and what to keep private. The result? There will be a point in time where decision making as it is right now will not be based on your own choice, but on a persona, which will make the choice for you.
Sources:
European Parliament and Council of European Union (2016) Regulation (EU) 2016/679. Available at: https://eurlex.europa.eu/legalcontent/EN/TXT/HTML/?uri=CELEX:32016R0679&from=EN (Accessed: 5 October 2020).
Pruitt, J., & Grudin, J. (2003). Personas: practice and theory. Proceedings of the 2003 Conference on Designing for User Experiences, 1–15.
Salminen, J., Jansen, B., An, J., Kwak, H., & Jung, S. (2018). Are personas done? Evaluating the usefulness of personas in the age of online analytics. Persona Studies, 4(2), 1-19.
Hi Carolin,
You wrote an interesting article, which has relevance to a discussion that once again was held yesterday in the Netherlands: the right of privacy.
Yesterday it was announced that the Dutch government will finally launch their Corona app, having announced the desire to launch one all the way back on the 6th of April. The Corona app can help in the contact research done after a COVID-19 infection. When the Dutch government announces such initiatives, an instant reaction of many Dutch citizins is the worry of what the government might do with this data. While I do agree that having such a discussion is essential, (data is of course very valuable and we need to be assured its used safely), I do think most Dutch citizins are a bit hypocritical: we all use google, microsoft, facebook (instagram), apple, and have no problems sharing our deepest, darkest secrets with American multinationals. Yet, when our own elected Dutch government announces it wants to collect even a tiny fraction of the data we give daily willingly to these American multinationals, in order to better fight COVID-19, a lot of Dutch people instantly get into defensive mode.
Afraid that the government might abuse the data, eventhough the Dutch government has many more checks and balances (which we even control as Dutch citizins. Think elections or parlementary investigations), than most of the American multinationals combined.
I find it fascinating that most people only think about their privacy when they are confronted close to home. In your search for this article, did you by any chance find any evidence that this plays a role? I would be interested to now more. In specific: would consumers (for example Dutch) be more concerned with privacy of their data if the company it native? So do Dutch people more willingly give data to Amazon than to Cool Blue? Or do German people more easily give data to Ebay than to Zalando?
Dear Carolin,
Interesting read! It is crazy the amount of data that is collected and stored by all these different parties. Thinking that we have a Doppelgänger in a different dimension is quit mind-blowing but scary at the same time. This made me think of the avatars that can be created in video games such as Sims where the aim is to make them look as much as possible like you. Now this could be done way easily and accurately! I also agree with the point that you mention, today this data is more or less only used for advertisement purposes but what will it become if it starts also showing different political or social statements. This could go way beyond our control and be used to manipulate us. Concerning your last point it is true that people in general do not keep track of all the different information they spread all around. Have you ever tried to ask Google to see all the data they collected from you?