Data Abuse
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Sunday, October 25th, 2009 (No comments yet) |
At first you might not believe me when I say that your information is valuable. Where you eat, how much you spend for Christmas, your struggle with weight… all these things give companies an advantage in convincing you to give money to them and based on history, companies are only too happy to use every advantage against you so long as they make money (extended warranties, Product Rebates, Gift Cards, etc.)
So the new cash cow is private information about people that will help companies sell things to you more effectively.
Step 1: Get as much of your data as they can.
While doing business with someone, they ask for information they don't actually need for their business. Sometimes they do it to support planned future capabilities and sometimes they do it for targeted marketing. And in some cases, they just sell it to someone else for some extra cash.
It happens all the time, but one of the more egregious examples I've personally seen was a small video-rental store who asked for your social security number as part of the sign up!
The best way to do this of course is to create a site or service where you will choose to volunteer personal data about yourself for no particular reason. For example: Facebook. Facebook openly uses the information in your profile to target ads to you sometimes in quite insulting ways:
With the knowledge that I was engaged to be married, the site splashed an ad across the left side of the screen playing into a presumed vulnerability. Do you want to be a fat bride? You'd better go to such-and-such Web site to learn how to lose weight before the big day.
Which brings us to step number 2…
Step 2: Use all the data to market to your interests (and also your weaknesses and insecurities).
The Risks
Even if you don't see a problem with the companies you do business with capturing and storing information you didn't give them permission to have, what about when they sell it or lose it. That's the basis of the ID theft problem which exists because of one kind of data broker, but those are carefully regulated now and only capture one kind of data.
