What properties of this data are considered valuable to marketing corporations? The most valuable data comprises every aspect of how a human being behaves. Their preferences, their personal information, their physical location, and their habits.
At all times, something as personal as location data is being sold as a product. Absolutely everything about a person is being sold for a very high profit, and it’s being done through commercial websites that are made free to access for this reason.
In this commercial metaphor, “data as oil”, the oil production is a collaborated spying effort on every single American for the interests of profit. In the process, web and mobile applications are being used to secure this data flow.
What does it look like? It’s certainly not an oil derrick on an open field, we must extend the metaphor to consider a landscape of production. Every single device that connects to the internet and uses a service such as Google contains these data oil derricks.
This oil derrick produces marketable data at varying rate and quantities. A social media application produces a vast amount of marketable personal data, including location data. A web search application collects a vast amount of different data as well.
Beneath this data is a human being, and the data tracks and defines this person as a human being. Being able to identify and target this type of person is a marketable product to a company that needs commercial advertising.
What are the effects of turning a living person into a marketable product?
What are the effects of turning a person into a commodity? Without even reflecting on the political preferences or policies of an individual social media corporation, what are the political and environmental side effects of this metaphor?
A loss of privacy, a loss of freedom, and a loss of control.
The most immediate and obvious effect of this data oil production is the crudely negotiated surrender of your personal information and your constant location. The social media company collects this data at a constant rate and sells it as a product.
The surrender of privacy is negotiated through one or two clicks during account registration or app installation. It is a second thought, and the effect is immediate. While a search engine application may collect data more intermittently, a social media application collects enormous amounts immediately.
Instantly, your personal information, your app activity, and your physical location is being sold for a profit. The application is free, and this is the exchange that takes place. Every personal detail of your life is shipped through a pipeline and sold.
The second is a loss of freedom. An online media company both enforces and communicates political influence. Dissidents are silenced, political messages are pushed. Some nations have gone as far as to hand out death sentences over social media posts.
The only interest is profit, so any of this data is up for bidding. Governments across the world have incentives to acquire and use this data for their own political reasons. Combined with a loss of privacy, it has devastating effects on the most basic human rights.
Finally, a loss of political and individual control is the combined effect of both. Imagine a person who is constantly bombarded with messages each day that are personally tailored to their preferences, the most personal details of their life, and their constant location.
Imagine this person under a government that uses the same information to enforce their will. Citizens are rounded up for spreading or consuming the wrong ideas, all that is allowed is encouraged profitable consumption guaranteed by your marketable data.
This is already a reality in many nations, and our world is slowly falling under its influence. As human beings and consumers, we are the resource that is being harvested. The effects of this production are disastrous in multiple forms, and the long-term repercussions are still unfolding.