By: Giovanni Gonzalez/Staff Writer
Every day, people give away their privacy in return for the use of the latest gadgets and conveniences, often without even knowing it.
Data mining is a relatively new marketing tactic made possible by the vast infiltration of electronics in our lives. Little do people know, or maybe they do know but just do not care, that many electronics we use on a daily basis are recording our activities and purchases and storing them into databases indefinitely. Sacrificing privacy for shopping convenience and a personalized web page is not worth it.
Electronics and applications from cell phones to desktop browsers have been logging information about your habits for some time. The biggest culprits guilty of using data mining tactics are major credit card companies, who blatantly sell information about the purchases you make. This information is used to create profiles about people that are sold to third-party advertisers for targeted marketing, or advertisements catered towards the likes and dislikes of individuals. This has great potential for abuse.
While it may not be such a big deal to some that the rich and powerful have access to their shopping, web browsing and location habits, it is only the beginning of the infringement of our privacy for the monetary gain of companies such as Facebook, Apple and MasterCard. All of the separate profiles generated by different data mining crusades could one day come together into one national database owned by the government. This would mean our government would own and operate a database full of any personal information you post on the web and any information they can deduce from your purchasing habits.
There is a difference between buying something and being sold something. Developers are continuously perfecting and expanding targeted marketing technologies with no intention of stopping. Direct marketing tactics are meant to increase the likelihood of a hard sell.
A future where merchandise retailers come to you offering all the products you habitually buy can be made possible by these technologies. As a rather selective shopper that likes to do his research before buying, I have a problem with that because it drastically reduces my choices.
When data mining and targeted marketing techniques penetrate too deep into our lives it will become a nuisance, and the freedoms we experience in our free market will start to dwindle. In order for the prices of virtually all goods and services to remain competitive, the choice of where and how to spend money must remain with the consumer. Otherwise, we will see less variety in goods and higher prices because direct marketing will stifle consumer choice in the favor of the sellers.
Everyone signs away a piece of their privacy each time they accept a new end-user license agreement or create a social networking page, and as of now the invasion of privacy only affects the surface of our lives, but that is still substantial.
The real concern is how far these techniques will go in the future and how they will affect our daily lives. Privacy is more important to me than any piece of hardware or software, and the potential disregard for my privacy by those who only wish to profit from me is disturbing.
For more on EULA’s, reference the article, “Software Licensing Puts Users at a Disadvantage,” published on Jan. 26, 2011, available on fiusm.com.
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