“Privacy is dead, and social media holds the smoking gun.” – Pete Cashmore
Drowning in the constant consumption of social media and information, we find ourselves amid a data revolution. But here’s the twist - your privacy becomes the currency for enjoying those beloved social media platforms. Whether it's the tailored recommendations on streaming sites or those laser-focused healthcare ads, data is at the forefront of our digital footprint and decision-making process. Today, as everything shifts to a digital apparatus, there is more sensitive data being stored from finance to healthcare and telecommunications than ever before. So, let's peel back the layers and discover just how your screens might be the lenses through which you're being observed...
The Information Paradox
Ever opened a browser window or mindlessly clicked “accept” while surfing the web? Well, congratulations, you've just invited cookies to your system drive party! These cookies are text files that collect and store information, spanning from visited pages to your habits. This data turns out to be incredibly lucrative as it can be sold to marketers who’ll target you through emails and advertisements. Who’s selling? Large-scale social media platforms like Meta, Google, Instagram, and Paypal collect a massive amount of data which is sold to third-party advertisers. Cybernews estimates that Instagram and Facebook are the largest information dealers, selling over 79% and 57% of user data to third-party companies, respectively.
Data Mining
Your online identity is a token. Those large tech companies with fancy machine learning models? They are on a mission to mine your data. Most large social media companies have built complex infrastructure with machine learning models that are trained to collect and extract information about users like us. Using this information, technology providers can better understand their product perception, their customers, and most importantly marketing strategies. “Big Data” is often the coined term used to describe the collection of information from a user base which is then analyzed on large-scale models. But here's where it gets eerie – what's happening in the hidden corners of data processes? What exactly is being collected, and how much do we know about it?
The "Cloud"
Now, let's shift gears and talk about the digital battlefield. The side we miss, the digital front. Forget bombs on the Big Apple; the first hits might land on a cluster of data centers in rural Virginia. One data breach on a company like Apple, Cisco, or Google can result in a loss of communication for who knows how long. When your iPhone storage is filled up and you upload it to the “cloud”, where do you think that information is going to be stored? The cloud is a term that refers to user data that is stored in remote servers in centralized locations. These cloud servers are the real unsung heroes of the internet, serving as the backbone of information, and the internet would quite simply cease to exist without them. An hour of downtime in Amazon’s data centers? That’s a $34 million hit. A single minute? A whopping $220,000 down the drain. Data centers all around the world today store a mind-boggling 1,500 exabytes of data, each exabyte equivalent to a billion gigabytes. Now wrap your head around that.
So there you have it, a sneak peek into the intricate tapestry of information in the age of Data. Perhaps a reminder to be a little bit more careful the next time you broadcast your life to strangers on the internet…
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