Yeah….they’ve got your number.

First, a confession; then a question. Confession: I have a longtime, rather unhealthy fetish for very luxurious, very expensive handbags. I spend an inordinate amount of time looking at websites in pursuit of my next conquest. I have visions of one day being able to, either by dint of hard work or luck at the lottery, drop a cool $20K–$40K on an Hermès Birkin bag.

Now for the question: Is it just me or does it freak other people out that you can look up some product on the Internet and then have ads for that same product follow you around from website to website for weeks, if not months? Or worse still, you can open your mailbox one day and find a direct mail piece or catalog for the very same item waiting for you inside?

I made the above confession freely to anyone who reads this blog. But really, I didn’t have to. If you work at the right company and have the right access, you probably already knew that about me. In fact, there are a lot of people who know that about me—and they know a whole lot else, because that’s the way big data works nowadays.

As a student of marketing, I’m well aware that the ability to track my online activity makes the Internet go all warm and fuzzy. And I’m also aware that I should be all for it. It being Big Data. However, when I see the sheer volume of companies that Ghostery says track me as I make my way from website to website, I do find myself feeling more than a little cyberstalked. And it is even more disconcerting to know that there is very little I can do about it. Sure, I can set Google Chrome to send “Do Not Track” requests. Yet as Chrome informed me when I did so, “Any effect depends on whether a website responds to the request, and how the request is interpreted.” In other words, a website can legally choose to completely ignore my request and its owners can then legally turn around and sell that data to anyone they want to.

The purveyors of big data would like you to believe that any attempt to regulate their industry would be the end of the Internet as we know it. One “sky is falling” type claimed that it would be “one more Big Government idea that’s inimical to consumer choice, the First Amendment, communications diversity and economic growth” (Rothenberg, 2010). Another threatened that it would lead to a day when we could no longer check sports scores the day after the big game (Zaneis, 2011). But the question of who should own our most personal data and what should be done with that data is a valid one.

In researching this article, I came across an almost dizzying array of tricks and tools that trackers use to sweep up personal information—from HTTP cookies to Flash cookies to web bugs—with each level more nefarious and harder to detect and destroy (Berghel, 2014). And the information gathered is then packaged and sold to “affiliates” and data brokers who combine your online behavior with your offline behavior, including sensitive medical information (Fomenkova, 2012).

Orwell predicted that Big Brother would arrive by 1984. He’s a little late, but he’s finally here.

References

Berghel, H. (2014). Privacy Informatics: A primer on defensive tactics for a society under siege. Computer.

Fomenkova, G. I. (2012). For your eyes only? A ‘Do Not Track’ proposal. Information & Communications Technology Law, 21(1), 33–52.

Rothenberg, R. (2010, August 9). Don’t fear Internet tracking. USA Today.

Simonite, T. (2013, June 17). Popular ad blocker also helps the ad industry. MIT Technology Review.

Zaneis, M. (2011, January 3). ‘Do Not Track’ rules would put a stop to the internet as we know it. U.S. News