Data and the collection of data of some kind has been occurring for thousands of years. According to the text, data in a modern sense is essentially “information gathered and shared though personal and public communication channels which becomes subject to new kinds of tracking, quantification, and analysis”. Marketing agencies monitor this online traffic in hopes of understanding consumers’ preferences and trends in the online market. When users visit a website, cookies, or small files, are sent to your computer by the website in order to monitor browsing. Until our last class and the reading on data, I was completely unaware of just how much these cookies were able to tell about a user online.
I have had a few experiences that underscore the lengths these websites and marketing agencies will go to in order to feed you products that you may buy. For example, one day, with my phone off and in my pocket, one of my friends was telling me about a brand of shorts that I should check out. After our conversation, I took out my phone and opened instagram. Sure enough, an add for those exact shorts, which I had never shown interest in before, was sitting right in front of me. As I scrolled down, ads for other brands of shorts continued to pop up. It begs the question of if voice assistants like Siri are ever really off, and if they are just a ploy to monitor people.
The privacy of people’s data has not respected but rather manipulated by top tier companies to maximize profit gains for sure but we the consumers are usually unaware of this data manipulation and all the policies designed to enforce this . I think mass public ignorance about technology plays a big role in this vice. I personally did not know about the use of cookies to monitor browsing or the voice tracking as well. This raises a question of morality to the Marketing agencies because they are profiting off a strategy that is unconsented. Even most people who know about these strategies continue to use the same technologies because of the modern-tech era that we live in and so there are limited solutions to this problem due to dependence on technology.