Over the years I have been buying and browsing stuff all over the internet. The first thing that appealed my attention was that after a few transactions on the Amaz0n website, I started to receive suggestions for my technical interests and further reading. This of course is of no surprise if one bears in mind that they do keep a record of all transactions done with them, and, based on that info they offer from their stock similar products. Simple! However, how much data do they have? How many persons are contained in their data base? Then, when I started to be a regular at a given supermarket I was offered a loyalty card. With this card I was able to accumulate points for each of the items I bought and then receive vouchers that I could redeem by more items or accumulate “many” points on suggested items by the store. Again, they are keeping a record of my buying patterns, crunching it to eventually tailor the promotions to me and make me buy “more of what I need”. Another one, when I check my email immediately after I start spotting online advertisement of items related to “keywords” contained in the text of my email... Then the natural question for me was: are ‘they’ keeping all this information on their data bases as well? WTF! How about your web search history? That -if you agree- might be kept somewhere. We are also at the “advent” of smartgrids. In other words utilities will eventually be able to know our energy consumption patterns; i.e. when are we at home, when do we arrive, how warm is it, when do we do laundry, cook, etc. To all this broth add the information that we divulge on our own accord: social networks like facebook, blogs (ouch), twitter, now the new “Buzz”, etc. There are many more examples like this, and I am sure that you might have thought of your own; but thinking about it, I arrived to the conclusion that there is still quite more room for “greater personalization”:
Link the whole bloody thing!
I am sure that on good hands, all this massive amounts of information can be put to good use; e.g. creating data bases for more efficient production processes, better health service statistics, human pattern behaviour, better energy forecasts, identification of social needs, etc etc. But there is a flip side to that coin, how about the downsides and the risks? It might sound a bit paranoic but the first thing that came to my mind was Orwell’s “nineteen eighty-four”. Or what about data breach and stolen identities? How secure is all our data in all those data bases and who has access to it? Are you safe?
I hope I got you vexed.
Have a nice day.
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