Savvy consumers today are aware that marketers and corporate companies mine personal data from mobile phones and computers, sourced primarily from search engines, social media sites, emails, text messages, and GPS location information. The internet, a free virtual public space idealized in the nineties, has become colonized through a swath of promised conveniences. In the beginning, the lure of free, convenient services for data was enticing. The improvement in user experience when checking email in the cloud was great enough so as not to elicit questions as to how the emails were handled — such as when Google launched Gmail in 2004, adding a second signal to enrich the profile of search engine users through personally identifiable information. GPS tracking has also since become a powerful method of gathering information on an individual. E-commerce sites advertise by dropping cookies to track online behavior. Thermostats, in a promise to lower heating bills, track data on how people behave inside their homes. But the underpinnings of demand for data by marketers and big corporations remains obscure to most individuals. What is the value of this data and is the digital privacy of individuals a fair trade for the use of internet services and applications?
Ambient Intelligence: A Higher Level of AI Cognition
Many believe that technology’s dominance over privacy is inevitable. Today, humans in developed countries occupy a mixed digital and physical space, one that is largely driven by automatic collection, trading and analysis of information with little or no effort to protect the fundamental rights and liberties of those who use the technology. As the physical and digital worlds merge, digital privacy is no longer a right, but rather a commodity to be traded and sold — meanwhile, physical privacy continues to be protected.
At this point, to say that consumers “do not care about privacy” is to dodge the ethical responsibility that comes with collecting data. As technology advances to include our immediate surroundings, the discussion around big data deepens as it may affect identity and lessen autonomy. In the future, those who handle data as an intermediary– which means delivering the necessary data to first-party companies while buffering and protecting the information collected on consumers — will fare better professionally than those who approach sensitive information like a commodity.