Do you want to take control of your personal data?
Posted by joe
As you all know, Google, Amazon, Facebook and plenty of others probably know more about you than your mother. Or at least they know more about certain parts of your life. They collect data in an effort to serve up more personalized marketing offers and messages. Privacy advocates are very concerned – though I find most of my students are not.
The whole issue raises an interesting dilemma — especially as browsers add “Do not track” buttons. These buttons let consumers opt out of providing data to some of these firms, see “Microsoft and Google play chicken over Do Not Track,” (CNNMoney, June 8, 2012). Many consumers want to receive targeted and relevant messages — it can make life and buying easier. Others prefer to have more control over their personal data. That is where some new companies are stepping into the fray. These companies may allow you to decide just how much data to reveal — and to which marketers. You can learn more from this Marketplace story, “Taking control of your personal data,” (June 8, 2012, link to listen or read the transcript).
What do you think? Are you worried about your online data being used to send you marketing messages? Would you take advantage of Personal or Enliken?
Tags: Privacy
This entry was posted on Monday, June 11th, 2012 at 8:16 am and is filed under Advertising, Ethics, Promotion. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
I am one who tries to protect my personal information to the best of my abilities but as I thought about why I may or may not agree with companies keeping track of where i am going on the internet, only one reason kept coming to mind for those who would not like it. Before I get into the that reason I would like to eliminate the obvious which one may give against the practice such as spam and possible hackers and such. But for those who are visiting sites that would be considered immoral and were hiding the fact that they were spending time at such a place would definitely use the “Do Not Track button” because they would not want to be exposed. The risk of being humiliated or even worse a relationship being lost would be enough of a reason to be the first one on line to vote against “site tracking”. Not one of them would want a company sending an email for a product while someone else may be in their email account or an add that would flash across the screen while watching a youtube video.
August 30th, 2012 at 7:47 pmPersonally, I believe it to be a good practice because it exposes you to products you may not be aware of and interests in something you may have never considered.
In the end if you had nothing to hide I don’t believe you would have even given the practice a second thought.