Personal data

THE DARK AND BRIGHT SIDES OF PERSONAL DATA :

 

Let's imagine a normal day, you wake up, eat breakfeast while checking

the latest news on social media, then as the day goes by, you do a

couple of researches online, go on multiple websites, accept the cookies

then go on social media to talk to your friends or see what others are doing. Those are simple things that everyone does on the daily, right ?   

 

A lot of people are aware that everytime they do something on the internet, it stays somewhere, but they don’t know where it goes and

how it is used. Websites actually keep track of everything you do or even

say. They collect data on everyone and there are two sides to it.  

 

First of all, there is the bright side. With all the data they have on you, 

they know your genre, your nationality, what you like, where you go, that pair black pair of boots you’ve been wanting for over 3 months now,

yes, they know everything. And they will show you ads that may interest

you with content based on the profile hey made up with all those 

informations about you. It's almost impossible to avoid those, you see

them everywhere and especially on social media, but those are not really a bad thing since they can be useful to your everyday life

and show you things that you might actually wanna buy. But imagine that

with millions and millions of people, all those informations on everyone

and you can’t control them, you don’t know who has them and what they 

are going to do with it, like selling it for instance. When people 

the power of this data, it became dangerous, people then learnt how to

use it to their advantage and it has now become one of the biggest

market online. According to the previsions of the World Economic Forum

his market will represent almost 500 billions of dollars in 2024.  

 

And that's also where the dark side of the data starts. There are many 

ways to use it in a bad way. I'm only going to go through two of them in this article.

 

Firtsly, we have discrimination. A recent Google study shows that men

and women are not shown the same advertisements. It applies to 

everything, even job advertisements, men will be shown jobs that have a bigger salary than jobs shown to women. It is the same process that is 

used in China. The "social credit" is based on the behaviour of the 

citizens, wether it is in the streets or even on social media, they use this

big data to then restrict people from applying to certain jobs or enroll 

their kids in certain schools, some can't even take transports, which

means they are incapable of leaving the country.  

 

And then, there is manipulation through big data, which is probably the

most talked about, the fake news shared on social media and shown to a certain category of people to influence them. I recently viewed “The great hack”, on Netflix, which is a documentary on

the Cambridge Analytica scandal, tha's actually what made me want towrite an article about this. We’re not aware at all of the power this data

has and how it can be usef against us. In the case of Cambridge 

Analytica, which is a political consulting firm, they collected, through 

Facebook mostly, the informations of 37 millions of users, which means

they alsi have informations on their friends and the friends of those 

friends, see how fast it goes ?

It means they had informations on almost all America. They were 

involved in Donald Trump's presidential campaign and their target was 

people who didn’t know who to vote for yet. They then proceeded to

show this category of people, advertisements that could potentially 

influence them to vote for Donald Trump. That changed the votes of

millions of people. The same firm also worked in favour of the Brexit. 

They succeeded to influence 7% of the votes for the referendum, whicj

which means that without all those informations collected on social media and used in an illegal way, Brexit may not have happened.   

 

This scandal brought up very important questions concerning the data and how we could protect it. That’s why new regulations in Europe have

been established such as RGPG and E-Privacy. We have to be more 

careful and aware of what we put online and know that there are bright

such as dark sides to everything, especially social media.