Privacy

Thinking that by setting a photo to private would prevent strangers to see your photos? Not the case with Facebook. In today's social media dominated era, every post, pictures, videos, tweets are stored, analyzed, and viewed by some complete strangers. Moreover, the speed for infrastructure development has always exceed our ability to fully comprehend its power, and the pages after pages user-agreement just made understanding of the document unnecessarily complicated. 

Apart from your personal postings on Facebook and Instagram, a google search result is also stored and then sold to companies that have interest in knowing about you. By collecting an extensive record of our search history, search engine companies then sell these data to companies, which allow them to conduct more personalized advertisement. Have you wonder why some of the pages runs the product image of your recent search, for example, Yeezy sneakers? It is because Google records your search, and by using what's so called " associative purchasing analysis", making other sneaker recommendations / websites to you, because of your browsing history shows that you are interested in this product. With these insights, companies can do more personalized pricing, and what that means for consumers could be paying more than the others guy, even though that you both are viewing the same product on two computers, side by side. 

More recently, Equifax's massive data breach of its customers' sensitive information such as Social Security number showed the challenges which many companies are facing. Equifax is a consumer credit reporting agency that holds many other sensitive information for over 800 million individuals. Security breach on such a scale and extent would significantly bring down end users trust in giving out our personal information.