Tech Talk: Does online privacy exist?

It’s an inevitability that using the internet carries some risks — and one of those risks is the increasingly terrifying amount of personal information that a website or advertising network has on even users who are supposedly “anonymous.”

Platforms like Facebook, Google, and all of their various analogs and subsidiaries keep track of virtually everything you do, say, everyone you interact with, and every search you make. They use this data for a variety of purposes — to surface content you’re likely to engage with, to market products that you’re likely to purchase, and to build a data profile for advertisers.

In essence, when you’re using one of their services, you become the product that gets marketed.

Even in cases where a user has opted out of being personally identified, or the platform anonymizes the data, they still build these profiles — they just don’t have your name, e-mail or other direct contact information. What they do have, however, is your location, your approximate age, your demographics, your interests, what products you buy. … The list goes on.

It’s actually likely that given that dataset, someone would be more likely to be able to pick you out of a crowd than if they simply had your name or e-mail address, so really, what’s the real advantage of being anonymous at that point? Mix in AI, or more accurately, the predictive capabilities of AI platforms, and the picture gets even more interesting. Advertisers are able to predict what products a consumer might need before they even know they do.

The upside to all of this, of course, is that your streaming services are able to suggest content you like. YouTube is able to show videos you like, and Alexa can recommend services you’re probably going to want to use, and those recommendations get better and better as time goes on.

The amount of information available to people via these platforms who have access to the advertising and user profiles is truly staggering, however.

We’re relying on companies to handle our personal data with care and not misuse it. There are regulations and guidelines in place for how that data is handled. Unfortunately, malicious actors can access this information, and some of it is even openly available. Over the past few decades, we’ve also seen that legislation moves more slowly than technology, and unfortunately, many of the laws were written after someone had already found an exploit.

Europe and several U.S. states have regulations — for example, GDPR — which attempt to give an end-user greater control over their data. Those regulations aren’t universal in the United States, and they still rely to some degree on how those companies choose to use data.

By virtue of using any of these platforms, you’re agreeing to terms of service that allow them access to this data. Even if you use private browsing, you’re still generating that profile. The nature of many of these platform — Amazon, or Google for example — make them hard to avoid even if you don’t use social media.

If you value privacy, your only real options are to deal with smaller businesses who don’t use the data they’ve collected so invasively.

For most of us, the genie is out of the bottle and the cost vs. benefit doesn’t play — but it’s important for people to understand just how much information third-parties can gather about them from their browsing behavior.