Digital Footprint-Jimmy Helfrich

After looking at my data that google, apple, and other companies have on me I realized the extent to which everything we do is stored and analyzed. I looked at Google Maps data on me and where I have gone, and it was exactly accurate with the activities I completed this weekend. I went to a lot of restaurants and breweries and every single one that I went to was shown and documented. It was kind of surprising how accurate it was, and kind of raises some concerns for me. If these companies know exactly where I like to go or ere I go often, it gives them an unfair advantage in determining my preferences. What I mean by this is these companies can target exactly what I might want, and thus target specific advertisements. Companies like Google ensure that it is private, but do we really know if they are not selling our information to other companies so that they could target us with advertisements? I noticed that the data we produced digitally is used to manipulate us in the Waze app. This weekend I took a trip to the Urban Chestnut Brewery, and the next day I opened the app and it was an advertisement for another brewery. I do not feel comfortable with this documentation of our digital footprints because it is a complete invasion of privacy. The idea that someone somewhere knows everything we do in our day to day lives terrifies me because what else is going on that we do not know about? We never know until more information comes out revealing that our lives are not private at all, and this is a major problem for me. I like my privacy and I do not like how we can be targeted as consumers just because we went somewhere. Though these companies probably have a great sense for my preferences, because of my digital footprint, I still feel that they do not have everything they possibly could. My use of Facebook is very minimal, and I would say I go on it maybe once a month. With the recent Facebook news, I feel this is a giant chunk of my digital footprint missing because of how much information Facebook stores on people. Therefore, my digital footprint is something that some companies have stored, but there is not as much as there could be because of my lack of Facebook usage.