35 Data Privacy
Tristan Kaplan
35.1 Introduction
Keywords
- Consumer – a person who purchases goods and services for personal use
- Personal Data – any information relating to an identified or identifiable individual
- Third Party – a person or group besides the two primarily involved in a situation
- Data Breach– a security violation, in which sensitive, protected or confidential data is copied, transmitted, viewed, stolen or used by an individual unauthorized to do so
- Algorithm – a process or set of rules to be followed in calculations or other problem-solving operations, especially by a computer
Learning Objectives
- Recognize what consumer data privacy is
- Recognize common ways in which this data is collected
- Recognize how your data is used and who can access it
Data privacy is letting the consumer keep their data private and not letting companies track their online activity without consent. Consumers should have the ability to keep their data secure. Very frequently, companies like Facebook and Google will collect and distribute our data without even letting us know. That data includes but is not limited to internet searches, websites visited (cookies), computer usage, etc. In this day and age, there is nothing anyone can do on the internet without having data collected.
Say you needed a new set of clothes for your date tonight. You hop in your car, put on your favorite playlist, and head to the store. After hours of searching, you find the right outfit and head back home. Once you got home from shopping, you opened up your computer and saw an ad with the same top you bought earlier that day. Just during this trip, your data was collected three times without you being aware. While driving, the GPS on your phone tracks your driving patterns were tracked and used to provide live traffic updates. The songs you listened to were recorded and used to recommend new music. After you purchased your new outfit, your credit company sent that information to online retailers. Every day we are tracked without us ever even considering it.
When talking about data privacy, there are four topics you should focus on. The first topic is what data is obtained from the consumers. The second topic is how the data is stored. The main form of data storage is physical server farms. These locations are buildings with many computers that store the big data collected. They can have security methods like firewalls, secure file transfer protocol, private virtual networks, and monitoring login attempts. The third topic is who has access to private data. Anyone from Google to Walmart to Moderna collects and analyzes your data. Often top officials of these companies are the only ones with access to it; however, hackers often find ways to get access to this data and use it for their own means. The fourth and most important topic is how that data is used. Companies will use your internet searches and history to then target you with ads based on that data. This is the mo