I’m Valuable!
All those who have felt self-doubt or self-consciousness before, never fear! Your data is incredibly valuable to companies and businesses worldwide! I believe that the most valuable form of data is data that can predict habits and behaviors. If a company can successfully and accurately predict a consumer’s behavior or tendency, it can market incredibly effectively, almost guaranteeing a sale every time. As a fairly normal representative of the “Millennial College Student”, my data is valuable to many companies that are seeking to market to or attract other students and people like me.
The problem with this is that I don’t ever get to see the value of my data; I am not ever compensated for providing my quite valuable data to companies. Instead, they collect my data, often not even in exchange for much of anything, and either sell it or use it to better their own services. It’s more difficult to justify a commercial exchange in which the provider receives few to no benefit for providing their service, or in this case, data. Perhaps companies might seek to justify it by saying that accessing their website or service is a fair exchange for collecting my data. But what if their website is just a sales site? They are already deriving a benefit from me by me shopping on their site; now they derive a greater benefit by also collecting my data. All I get is to spend money on their products and get them in the mail eventually – the same thing I’ve always gotten.
I’m providing an incredible amount of data to apps and service providers every day, most of the time without even noticing or acknowledging that I’m doing so. I use my GPS regularly, as well as several apps that track my daily activity, location, mood, health, and desires. My Google Search history in and of itself is a valuable place to find out a lot about me as an individual. I also use Spotify regularly, so companies if they wanted to could easily find out my taste in music and extrapolate information about me based on that; they could also advertise to me using songs that they know for a fact that I listen to often. My data, as I stated earlier, might be of particular value because of my generational place: many companies are seeking to attract those of my age group and education level.
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It is kinda interesting to consider that a lot of our pro data collection points have largely been hypothetical now that I think about it. Like plenty of us have/would argue that companies can use the data they collect to make adds which would help make us aware of products we would want, yet so few of us can probably claim that we’ve seen an ad that felt like it was targeted specifically towards us. Not to say that any of the positive points of data collection aren’t true, just that for the most part they (and some of the negative points as well, if we’re being fair) are largely based on speculations.
It seems like you don’t feel like you’re getting a fair trade of services for data given, and often I feel the same way, but I think this shows how much more power the owners of these websites have because they know they can get away with taking so much data and we will continue to visit their sites. In a lot of ways it doesn’t seem like you can opt out of using their services or out of giving up your data.