Who has your data? What are they doing with it?

The time to put on your tin hats has come. The quest for all the information about you is well underway.

Big data will eventually be viewed as one of the most dis-empowering thing to happen to the individual through our addiction to ever connectedness.

One day we had free internet, the next day, we are its slave. Time to put on my tinfoil hat again to talk about data security, giving it away for free and ruining your business.

Surely I’m being paranoid.

There are just too many occurrences of folk giving up information without knowing what they are giving away.

A colleague said to me last week “Does it really matter Mark? Now it’s a choice between giving the data for free to Google, Facebook or Microsoft…”. The illusion of choice.

Let’s look at places we give away data which ultimately is turned against us. I’m not bothering with Facebook because you should know that already.

Google. Sabre. You get it.

I have written about this one here already. A search engine combines with a travel company to cut travel agents out of the picture.

Google harvests the data, Sabre provides the engine and bobs your uncle, they’re using your smarts to work against you by booking direct with hotels.

There is no argument.

How about Windows 10?

After my 48^th blue screen of Windows 8 I started looking forward to its replacement.

Windows 10 sounds exciting and even better it is free just like Facebook and Gmail.

So why is Windows 10 free? Because it’s a machine to harvest your user data.

The value of the information you produce for Microsoft for using the new, free O/S is worth more than the revenue they would generate in trying to sell it to you. Google are scared.

Why is it valuable? Think minority report. Don’t pretend. Targeted advertising. It’s the new black. Not just targeting you.

GfK Travelscan?

This system will anonymously harvest and aggregate data like what you book, where you book, where you search, who you book through and how.

Subscribed Australian travel agents can review all manner of weird and wonderful trends. Australian travel agents or subscribers that is.

I’m not saying don’t participate but I am saying understand the mechanism.

Who has access to this data? Who else can subscribe? How will it be used? How will it actually benefit you? Who else is participating? TripAdvisor? So why you giving up data for them?

To summarise – know what it is you keep giving away and understand it now.

Don’t complain if later you feel ripped off.

What tools do you have in place to protect your privacy?