How smartphones are watching us and how it threatens

2024 Author: Malcolm Clapton | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-17 03:44

Smartphones know too much about their owners and affect their lives much more than you might imagine.

How smartphones are tracking us

Using our smartphones every day, we generate a huge stream of data. By tracking and analyzing our behavior, gadgets create digital user profiles with many details of our personal life.

And this is far from a simple accounting of our activities: digital profiles are used by Warning over illegal trade in people’s information companies for their purposes and, as a rule, without our knowledge. By gathering information while apps are running or in the background, sophisticated algorithms analyze a ton of things, including location, search history, social media communications, as well as finance and biometrics.

What do they know about us

All this information can tell a lot. Each type of data tells us about our interests, preferences and hobbies, from which we can draw conclusions about a person's education, religion, political views, sexual orientation and gender identity, as well as social connections and health.

Various types of data are combined to build a comprehensive profile, and there are already companies Firms Are Buying, Sharing Your Online Info. What Can You Do About It? specializing in selling this kind of information.

Such profiles can contain sensitive and sensitive information such as ethnicity, income level, marital status and family composition.

A recent study found 7 in 10 Smartphone Apps Share Your Data with Third-Party Services that seven out of ten mobile apps send collected information to third parties. Moreover, data from different programs complement each other. In fact, a smartphone can be turned into a tracking device.

How the obtained data is used and how it threatens

Such information is in great demand among companies and is needed primarily for targeted advertising and the provision of personalized services. However, its application is not limited to this.

Imposing loans

Even conventional targeted advertising based on smartphone data can have a real impact on our lives and well-being. People in financial difficulties can get Google was right to get tough on payday loan ads - and now, others should follow suit advertising microloans in the search, and using their services, get into debt.

Discrimination on various grounds

Targeted advertising also provokes discrimination and corporate bias against people. Race is not yet explicitly listed on a Facebook profile, but a user's ethnicity can be determined based on the content they like and the pages they interact with. Research by the nonprofit ProPublica shows Facebook Lets Advertisers Exclude Users by Race that you can hide rental or job ads for people of a specific ethnicity or age group.

This approach differs from traditional advertising in print media, radio and television, which does not have exclusive targeting. Anyone can buy a newspaper, even if they are not the target audience of the publication.

On the Internet, you can completely exclude a person's access to certain information, and he will never know about it.

Credit check

Social media data can also be used to determine creditworthiness. The analysis of the language of the user's messages and even the analysis of the solvency of his friends are used as indicators. This, in turn, can affect tax rates, loan interest rates, home buying opportunities and career prospects Discredited: How Employment Credit Checks Keep Qualified Workers Out Of A Job.

The same risk arises when we use apps for payments and purchases. In China, the government announced Big data meets Big Brother as China moves to rate its citizens about plans to combine personal spending data with official documents such as tax returns and traffic fines. This initiative is already running on a pilot basis and, once fully adopted, will lead to the assignment of the China's dystopian social credit system is a harbinger of the global age of the algorithm to every citizen. And these ratings, in turn, will be used to assign privileges and penalties for loans and promotions.

All this is not a distant future, but reality. Smartphones are effective surveillance devices, and everyone who uses them is at risk. At the same time, it is impossible to determine all the data collected and used by smartphones in order to understand the scale of the impact. What we know may only be the beginning.