this post was submitted on 18 Oct 2024
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submitted 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago) by BigBootyBoy to c/[email protected]
 

Firstly, I'm not against privacy or anything, just ignorant. I do try to stay pretty private despite that.

I wanted to know what type of info (Corporations? Governments? Websites??) Typically get from you and how they use it and how that affects me.

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[โ€“] [email protected] 37 points 2 months ago (8 children)

Let me tell you a story. Many years ago I worked for big banks and insurance companies. One day I was tasked with a project. It was an amazing, from the tech point of view, project. It was something like this: a user navigates to a bank website looking for information about some product. The website presents the user a simple contact form - first name, last name, phone number and/or email. Based on provided data bank would use it to update user data (if there was no official account it would update the "ghost" account, aka "I know about you, but you don't know about me"). Next the bank would scrape all publicly available social media accounts and build the "hidden" profile (I'll get to this later). Based on all that data, user would be assigned a score based on which all future interaction with a bank would be determined. For a regular person this would mean that "I'm sorry but according to our system we cannot give you a loan".

Now, about the "hidden" profile. It's a thing that all big companies (including banks and insurance companies) hold. It's all the data collected from all publicly available profiles (and sometimes from the shady sites), used to create a profile that's not visible to a frontline workers and it's referenced as a "system decided based on your data".

Now, to make this more scary. This happened 10-15 years ago. Way before the so called AI. Imagine how much more data those companies have about you in today's world and how good they are in processing it.

[โ€“] [email protected] 3 points 2 months ago (7 children)

Now i have another question. What's the issue if they're ONLY using this info to improve my experience or make sensible business decisions?

[โ€“] tiddy 5 points 2 months ago

"Improve user experience" tends to mean if you're poor, the lowest level of hell isn't gonna compare to how shitty of an experience they'll give you

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