| Examples on how companies and people can make more money by exploiting the massive amounts of private data being collected and sold? I guess that's fair. No company will tell you when they exploit your data to their advantage. It's hidden. Prices can be set according to the data companies have on you and the assumptions they make using that same data. The price you're asked to pay for something when you shop online isn't always the same price your neighbor would be asked to pay for the exact same item. Lots of potential here too when restaurants don't publicly disclose their prices, but insist that you use a cell phone app or scan a QR code just to see a menu. Your prices don't have to be the same as the person in line behind you for the same foods. Physical retailers have been trying to get this going for a long time. "For example, ZipRecruiter, an online employment marketplace, indicates that it could increase profits by 84% by experimenting with personalized prices"
(https://link.springer.com/article/10.1057/s41272-019-00224-3) Fast food chain Wendy's tried to move the needle closer to personalized pricing (aka discriminatory pricing) when they said they were moving to surge pricing and you'd never know how much a burger was going to cost you until you'd already waited in line at the drive through and were told what price you were getting. They backed down due to consumer backlash, but their desire to squeeze every last dime possible out of you by leveraging big data and algorithms is still there. Hotel/airfare/travel industry has been doing this for a very long time already (https://www.cnet.com/tech/services-and-software/mac-users-pa... and
https://millionmilesecrets.com/guides/are-airlines-raising-y...) Health insurance companies want your data so they can charge you more for not moving enough, or because people in your zip code were logged eating more fastfood, or because you've been spending too much on alcohol at the store. https://www.propublica.org/article/health-insurers-are-vacuu... https://www.ama-assn.org/practice-management/digital/insurer... A lot of the tracking we see is explicitly trying to assess traits like intelligence, education level, and mental illnesses including dementia and bipolar disorder. Here for example is a pizza shop that will "create a profile about you reflecting your preferences, characteristics, psychological trends, predispositions, behavior, attitudes, intelligence, abilities, and aptitudes." You know, just normal pizza shop stuff! (https://pie-tap.com/privacy/) Companies and scammers alike can easily target uneducated and low intelligence individuals, and machine learning algorithms can detect when bi-polar people are in a manic phase, or what time your ADHD meds usually start to wear off, or when someone with alzheimers starts sundowning and they can jump at those chances to hit people with ads, scams, and manipulations when they think their target is weakest/most confused/most impulsive. Even without a diagnosis your mental health is a huge business opportunity for the person willing to exploit it (https://www.politico.com/news/2022/01/28/suicide-hotline-sil...) The data being collected on you is increasingly used for really big things like if you get a job, or if your rental lease agreement gets approved, but it's also used for really trivial things like determining how long to leave you on hold when you call a company (https://www.nytimes.com/2019/11/04/business/secret-consumer-...) Companies aren't collecting huge amounts of facts about you and your life because it's fun for them. They pay a lot of money to purchase, collect, store, maintain, backup, and scrutinize all that data, and they do it because it's making them money. Almost always, their increased profits come at your expense. |