How much do Internet companies know about us, and what do they plan to do with the information? If only we knew.
/ASSUMING YOU POSSESS a cell phone and a computer and a credit card, the following scenario, or something like it, might sound familiar.
Your morning begins with coffee and a bagel and the morning paper, perhaps read on a laptop. You click on stories about Egyptian unrest, the firearms industry and Downton Abbey. Two other websites are open on your desktop. One of them shows your Facebook account. You notice that you've been "tagged" in a photo from last week's poker game, in a pose that suggests one too many beers. Meanwhile, a friend has sent you a link to an article in the Onion that zestfully parodies a well-known senator. You "like" it.
You head out for your daily commute. At the toll booth, a Fastrak device validates the code on your car and records the date and time of your arrival.
You stop for gas. You swipe your debit card. The pump asks for your ZIP code and you type it in. As the 20-gallon tank fills, you pull out your smartphone and do a quick search for a weekend flight to Chicago. Along with the flight schedules and airfares, an advertisement appears about a local concert at the same venue where you attended a performance last month.
In the first two hours of your day, computers have recorded that you are a likely watcher of PBS, you drink alcohol and you have a penchant for irreverent humor. They know you drive a large vehicle and probably have family in the Midwest. They know when you go to work and the route you take. It's 8 a.m. and you've already left a sizable virtual fingerprint.
Now add the dozens of other electronic transactions you make in a given day—every website you visit, every item you purchase online, all the searches you do, all the posts you make on social media sites—plus those of all your friends. Multiply that by hundreds of days of Internet activity. Throw in motor vehicle records, mortgage documents, credit scores, medical diagnoses. What does your profile look like now?
Data about all of us lives online, in "clouds," on our web browsers and in others' databases. Cell phones show our physical location and track the places we have been. Websites display the address and price of home purchases, along with the buyer and seller. Advertising agencies know the web pages we have visited and the text we have entered online. Increasingly, and with increasing sophistication, companies are collecting, analyzing and selling data about tens of millions of people. And most of those people have no idea when or how it's happening. [MORE]
