Big Data Privacy

In the Big Data Privacy unit, I learned about the value that a person should have for their very own privacy online. Most actions that are done on the internet by people are usually taken as data by the company that owns the website that the person might be on. Every little bit of information such as how long someone looks at something is collected and used for that company's benefit. Often time companies make money off of this process by selling this information to advertisers, advertisers use any information they can get to show effective advertisements that will cause consumers to click on it and hopefully purchase whatever product that they were currently advertising.

This method in order to profit from seems extremely wrong due to the fact that it is private information being taken from people. People trust these well-known websites online and these were the websites that were collecting the most information on people and selling the information to advertisers. I feel like this is completely wrong and one of the TED talks in this unit mentioned that the only way to stop this type of business is to allow society to turn away from advertising-based products, that is the only way we can have our own privacy from.

Another part of this unit focused on the increasing amount of smart home products. Products such as Amazon’s Echo also known as Amazon Alexa. Products like these are usually speakers with a built-in microphone that is constantly awaiting a user's command. In order for this to work the device's microphone must be on 24/7, constantly listening. It has been admitted by companies that all this data is collected and used for profit. I find this extremely concerning that businesses are allowed to take actions like this and use data like this and I believe this type of business shouldn’t be allowed and our society should slowly try and turn away from the model of relying heavily on advertising to find, use, and sell products.