BBW
Legend
- Location
- betwixt and between
- Name
- BB
Two, for me, very thought provoking articles in yesterday's New York Times Week in Review section:
Should Personal Data Be Personal, by Somini Sengupta The lead in:
And this article Facebook Is Using You, by Lori Andrews, which is more of an opinion piece:
There are a lot of hair raising points made in both of these articles especially, it seems, for those of us in the USA but I'm sure there are many countries across the globe that use data mining for their own ends. Food for thought. I'm certainly going to make sure our daughter reads these articles. Hmm, if I email them via the NY Times website...what will that do to her data trail if she uses Google mail?
Should Personal Data Be Personal, by Somini Sengupta The lead in:
MAX SCHREMS, a 24-year-old law student from Salzburg, Austria, wanted to know what Facebook knew: He requested his own Facebook file. What he got turned out to be a virtual bildungsroman, 1,222 pages long. It contained wall posts he had deleted, old messages that revealed a friend’s troubled state of mind, even information that he didn’t enter himself about his physical whereabouts.
Mr. Schrems was intrigued and somewhat rattled. He wasn’t worried about anything in particular. Rather, he felt a vague disquiet about what Facebook could do with all that information about him in the future. Why was it there at all, he wondered, when he had deleted it? “It’s like a camera hanging over your bed while you’re having sex. It just doesn’t feel good,” is how he finally put it. “We in Europe are oftentimes frightened of what might happen some day.”
Mr. Schrems’s sentiment is emblematic of the discomfort sweeping through Europe about the ways in which Internet companies treat personal information. That discomfort has, in turn, prompted proposals for stricter regulation of online data across the continent. And Europe’s moves to protect Internet privacy — something Americans have not, as yet, actively agitated for — have given rise to a thorny question: How do the laws and mores of different nations manage, if at all, the multinational companies that now govern our digital lives?
Personal data is the oil that greases the Internet.
And this article Facebook Is Using You, by Lori Andrews, which is more of an opinion piece:
Last week, Facebook filed documents with the government that will allow it to sell shares of stock to the public. It is estimated to be worth at least $75 billion. But unlike other big-ticket corporations, it doesn’t have an inventory of widgets or gadgets, cars or phones. Facebook’s inventory consists of personal data — yours and mine.
...The magnitude of online information Facebook has available about each of us for targeted marketing is stunning. In Europe, laws give people the right to know what data companies have about them, but that is not the case in the United States....
There are a lot of hair raising points made in both of these articles especially, it seems, for those of us in the USA but I'm sure there are many countries across the globe that use data mining for their own ends. Food for thought. I'm certainly going to make sure our daughter reads these articles. Hmm, if I email them via the NY Times website...what will that do to her data trail if she uses Google mail?