Who is getting rich off you? The insidious big data economy.
Where is your data now? Follow the money.
- Your day to day actions on the Internet give businesses personal data that turns you into an ad target – or the opposite.
- Facebook, for example, allowed landlords to block demographic groups such as African Americans, LGBTQ, or disabled people from seeing housing ads – a violation of the 1968 Fair Housing Act.
- Data brokers have crossed a line, but the laws that should regulate them are outdated; just look at the billion-dollar data deal between 23andMe and Big Pharma. Is it ethical?
- Facebook and Google began as companies with supposedly noble purposes.
- Creating a more connected world and indexing the world's information: what could be better than that?
- But pressure to return value to shareholders came at the expense of their own users.
Facebook gave Spotify and Netflix access to users’ private messages
An exhaustive report from The New York Times shows the alarming extents to which Facebook has been sharing user data.
- The report is based on internal documents and interviews with former employees of Facebook and its corporate partners.
- It shows how Facebook gave more than 100 tech companies access to user data that goes beyond the scope that the social media giant had previously disclosed.
- Below are some tips for how you can prevent Facebook from sharing your personal data.
Heart-wrenching letter confronts tech companies' accidental cruelty
"Didn't you see me Googling 'baby not moving?'" Gillian Brockell wrote a heartbreaking open letter to big tech companies imploring them to change the ways they target ads to users.
- Advertisers are increasingly using hyper-specific information on users, collected by big tech companies, to sell products.
- An open letter published Tuesday outlines how this kind of ad targeting can be not only creepy, but also inadvertently cruel and distressing.
- Also on Tuesday, the House questioned Google's CEO, partly on issues related to data privacy.
How the marketplace of ideas went rogue
Opinion ruined journalism and Facebook killed truth—but there's a way to make it right.
- The marketplace of ideas is a better metaphor than it's intended to be, notes Eli Pariser. As any good economist will tell you, the best product doesn't always rise to the top.
- The institutional gatekeepers and experts who once kept checks and balances on the marketplace of ideas have been replaced by social media algorithms that reward emotion and outrage over expertise and truth.
- How can media institutions like Facebook make this right? By reevaluating the business model that serves advertisers instead of readers, and by clearly stating their values—even if that means losing some of those 2 billion users.
The Charles Koch Foundation is committed to understanding what drives intolerance and the best ways to cure it. The foundation supports interdisciplinary research to overcome intolerance, new models for peaceful interactions, and experiments that can heal fractured communities. For more information, visit charleskochfoundation.org/courageous-collaborations. The opinions expressed in this video do not necessarily reflect the views of the Charles Koch Foundation, which encourages the expression of diverse viewpoints within a culture of civil discourse and mutual respect.
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