Data Mining: Everything you need to know!

Everything is online these days. Want to know about something, search. Feeling hungry or want to watch a movie, open an app, or a website. Feeling bored, open your favorite social media app. The Internet has changed our lives for the better, made our lives easier. “What could go wrong?” you may ask.

Spoiler alert: A lot

What’s Going On?

In technical terms, you are being open-sourced, and the scary part, you don’t know what’s being open-sourced, or when it has been done.

But how?

Let me introduce you to data mining and its 200 Billion dollar industry.

Well, you might be thinking that this industry must be filled with hackers and highly skilled programmers, right?

Wrong. Even you can be a part of it. It’s no big effort, as people will do most of the job for you, by exposing their personal information to the public. The address, marital status, hobbies, age, I mean everything they give up to their public accounts on Facebook and other social media, can be accessed by you.

But that ain’t much data, right? So how can someone in this industry get more data? Well, that’s where they start approaching companies who are willing to sell their users’ data. So who do they approach?

The Secondary Source of Income

Many companies have already found that they can have a secondary source of income by selling their data to data brokers (someone who buys and sells data). So, who are the main convicts?

Google? Facebook? Amazon?

Nope. As far as we know, these companies have specified in their privacy policies that they never sell their data to others. They use it mainly for their targeted ad services or to better know about you. The data they have about you stays with them (unless an unfortunate data breach occurs of course.)

So who are the actual convicts?

They might be your favorite retail store, who gives you loyalty cards and instead gets to know your personal information and whatever you buy through them. Or it may be a vehicle licensing agent (remember the long forms you fill?). Also, it might be schools or even hospitals. Or maybe websites that look normal, making you fill their forms, which in the end, gets sold to data brokers.

Cookies? They have a lovely name, don’t they? Do you have any idea what they might be tracking about us? Well they can’t go too far, I agree, but drops do make the ocean, right?

Well, I guess you get the idea. The convicts are all around us. This might seem scary, or you just don’t care. That’s up to you.

So What’s next?

Data brokers who buy all the data they possibly could would then aggregate and sort them. Data, here, isn’t just a piece of information. Its human behavior. They look for patterns throughout the data which might be useful for them in the future.

What now? They sell the data they have collected to companies who are willing to receive them. These can then be used in plenty of ways, for example, to better target the company’s marketing campaigns, in case of advertising agencies, or to find potential people who would be interested in their product, or in other ways that will, in the end, help the company to cut costs and find more users for their product/services. Also, they can use the data to improve their services.

As you can see, a proper set of data is pretty valuable in many ways for any company. That is why there is this thirst for more data.

“But wait? Do you mean to say collecting data isn’t bad for us?”.

Certainly not. Guess what will happen if the data reaches the wrong hands. This means the wrong people will happen to gain a lot more information about us, which is scary and frightening. Also, its a fact that data brokers sell their data to other data brokers. This trade takes place in the darknet, making it pretty impossible to track where our data travels to.

Conclusion

Although data collection seems pretty good in some ways, it can be disastrous. Also, understand the fact that all of this happens to be legal, as the user agree to have their data collected.

Remember all those “Agree & Continue” buttons you immediately press without worrying about what you agreed to? The so-called privacy policies usually list what data it collects from you and how it uses them. This way the user has given their digital signature to take and process their data.

What we need now is more regulation and control on how the data is taken from us and used. Things like the GDPR are steps in the right direction but even they have loopholes, making them insufficient.

One thing is sure, this is a confusing industry that’s growing exponentially. People still rush onto services/products that are free, agreeing to privacy policies without reading them. There needs to be more awareness. One thing should be made clear, if you are not paying for the product, then you are the product.

Cheerio!