Life was much different 30 years ago. The world back then was connected in many ways. We could take a plane trip anywhere on the planet, and within 12 hours or so, we could be halfway around the globe. A phone could mostly reach anyone, anywhere. Just go to the kitchen wall and dial. And our news sources were “up to the minute” if only we had a TV or a radio.
But these days, our planet is ultra-connected. In less than a second, we can shout out our thoughts to the world. We can learn anything in one click. And, we can’t go anywhere without being photographed or filmed. Information now flows at the speed of light or faster. And once this happened, we humans became data. Now, information is collected about every person on this planet. And the reason comes down to one thing. Money. We can be sold and traded to anyone anywhere. Our likes, our intentions, our thoughts, and our health information.
My good friend Linda Stowe recently wrote a piece that touches on this in our Wordle Words daily postings. And now I share it here, with you.
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The Feeding of Ads
by Linda Stowe
If you were to scroll through the ads on my Facebook feed, you would see mostly ads for food, furniture. and compression socks. A scroll through my Twitter would show ads for news platforms, pharmaceuticals, and financial instruments. At first glance, this would seem like the profiles of two different people, but maybe not. The Facebook ads are probably based on online purchases that I have made over the past year. The Twitter ads, if they are tailored to me, might be linked to online searches. Or maybe all this is coincidence and everyone else sees the same ads that I do. Somehow, I doubt it.
This morning I listened to a discussion about surveillance capitalism. This is an economic model that describes the harvesting of personal data for sale to the highest bidder. There was a time when I experienced shock to see an ad for and item on one site that I had just looked at on another site. I thought it was just a happy coincidence until the time that I accidentally clicked on a water heater ad and then had to put up with pop-up ads for water heaters for months.
It would be like if I were at the mall and looked at mittens at J.C. Penney’s, then when I walked out of the store every kiosk in the mall was manned by mitten mongers. Ten years ago, that might have been unthinkable, but today our shopping habits are being monitored at every turn and we take it as matter of course.
Some people worry about government spying on them, but I think that it is becoming more evident that we need to worry about all the ways that data is gathered about us as we go about our daily lives. I heard one woman comment that she was in her kitchen chatting with her friend about buying a jacket for her son and then later that same day she saw ads for that exact jacket on her Facebook feed. She wondered if her phone or her Roomba or her Ring doorbell was listening in to her conversations. Maybe this was a coincidence or maybe the woman lingered a little too long on a jacket ad similar to the jacket she wanted and that behavior was added to her profile. Whether it’s spying by electronic devices or tracking by websites that sell our data to algorithms, the fact is that we are in the crosshairs of something beyond our control.
This monitoring goes beyond shopping habits. Entities such as Google, Amazon, Facebook, etc. constantly develop and monitor profiles of every person who interacts with a phone, a computer, or some other electronic device capable of gathering data. Those profiles are being enhanced and resold every second. Our profiles show our friends, our interests, our behaviors, our politics, our health, our values. And everything is for sale.
Podcast link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_LKcnBnP_Rk
Going, going, gone. Data sold. That’s you.
