Companies secretly collecting and selling information about your online behavior
The large-scale information collection, information sale, and free access to sensitive, private information, accompanied by inadequate regulatory controls, leaves much room for misuse. Those who desire to limit access to their personal details find themselves with scant options as, in a majority of instances, parties that collect data are able to categorize, store, and sell free or captured information without the consent of the concerned individual. Even in instances where information is voluntarily given to social networking or e-shopping websites, web users cannot control who the information will be sold to (Tsesis, 2014). The data industry is currently a three-hundred-billion-dollar-per-annum industry, with around three million employees in the US alone. Information brokers attempt to understand customer identity and interests. For organizational delivery of more relevant advertisements to customers, data-brokering companies have to provide information on services and products of potential interest to buyers. All data collected and used by them is legal, secure, and accurate. All kinds of businesses, right from small companies to Fortune 500 corporations, are clients of these companies (Morris & Lavandera, 2012).
Information is immensely valuable to individuals as well as companies. Data-brokering organizations’ critics claim average consumers are unaware of the fact that their sensitive information is sold by such sites. They assert that this constitutes a potential privacy risk. However, on the other hand is the fact that major decision-making...
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