After viewing the provided TED talks, I began to think about my own life, how I communicate online, and how easily trackable I am. Quite honestly, it freaked me out. With technology so intertwined with our day to day lives, privacy is becoming rare. In one of the TED talk videos, the speaker mentioned how the concept of privacy will change and evolve as new generations are exposed to less and less privacy as they're being born into an age surrounded by online media; they've never known a time without the internet, so they don't know anything different.
I then started to get frustrated; as mention in another TED talk, these companies are using us and taking full advantage of our data without our "informed consent." Nowadays, whenever you download or sign up for a new app, users have no choice but to accept terms and agreements, but these binding contacts are so lengthy and heavily worded that tech companies know users won't fully read the terms and conditions before clicking a agree. It's the purposely putting users in a corner forcing us to sign away our data that gets me most upset.
In my own research, I found a TED talk titled "What tech companies know about your kids," which described the ways tech companies start building and collecting data on kids from the time they're born. As someone who was born after the creation of the internet, I found this particularly striking. The video explained how data collected about teenagers were being used and sold to educational data brokers who would give detailed information about specific students and their interests to give them to scholarship companies. This is just one example of the many ways data is being profiled. It's horrifying to think someone has a collection of all my data searches ever and can sort through and categorize them for specific uses unknown to me.
Going forward, I'm going to be much more cautious and aware of my actions online. I don't have anything to hide, but I just find the use of our data wrong and just plain creepy. It's awful that most people haven't had their eyes opened to this yet.
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