Private Information

My information has been online since I was 8 years old and I registered for my first Gmail account. In the following 11 years, my name, address, interests, photos, videos, and thoughts have been all around the internet and have been stored by tech conglomerates the world over. I have lost track of how many websites I have given permission to use my personal information, my friends, my location, and my interests through Facebook, Instagram, or Twitter. I was actually appalled at how detailed the location data used by Apple Maps was inside my iPhone. The company tracked not only where I was at but how long I was there and how many times I had been there since. My phone knew exactly how long I had been working at Chaifetz Arena and subsequently when I went home everyday. On the one hand, this data can be crucial in the case of a massive catastrophe that required medical attention in my vicinity, and family and friends would need to pinpoint me to find out where to come help. However, the majority of users are simply living their lives while governments and tech companies analyze our movement to assess how and when to market their products in the perfect location. Companies pass this information around willy-nilly and frankly, this is why hacking is such a pressing threat in our society. One breach in a major company's data brokerage, and millions of files containing names, birthdays, home addresses, and credit card numbers spill into the void, ready for anyone to use that data.
I am not surprised that my data is freely owned by Apple and I have "signed my life away. " I was surprised that Google had relatively little data in their files. They did have my search history which is no all-time shock, but they didn't have my YouTube search history or my watch history. Also in regards to location, Google Maps had nothing on my location during the same time that Apple had been collecting. While that is heartening to some degree, it is just a shift of the burden of proof from one company to the other. There is no guarantee Apple uses my data any more responsibly than Google especially when coming to advertisement. My laptop has suggested ads based on my search history very often. I hope that the standards of online data sharing become much stricter and encrypted in the future, or else we bear the probability of data being used in much more sinister methods than simply targeted ads.