You probably have no idea how much of yourself you have given away on the internet, or how much it’s worth. Never mind Big Brother, the all-seeing state; the real menace online is the Little Brothers — the companies who suck up your personal data, repackage it, then sell it to the highest bidder. The Little Brothers are answerable to no one, and they are every-where.
What may seem innocuous, even worthless information — shopping, musical preferences, holiday destinations — is seized on by the digital scavengers who sift through cyberspace looking for information they can sell: a mobile phone number, a private email address. The more respectable data-accumulating companies — Facebook, Google, Amazon — already have all that. Even donating money to charity by texting a word to a number means you can end up on databases as a ‘giver’ — and being inundated with phone calls from other noble causes. Once your details end up on a list, you can never quite control who will buy them.
As you surf the web, thousands of ‘third-party cookies’ track your browsing habits. Then there’s your smartphone, which can log information every waking and sleeping moment. Quintillions — yes that really is a number — of pieces of data are being generated by us, about us. Look at Facebook. In a typical week, its users upload 20 billion items of content — pictures, names, preferences, shopping habits and other titbits: all information that can be stored and later employed to help advertisers.
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