The personal data available on the Internet, is an extremely tasty morsel for data brokers who, by collecting it meticulously, sell it at a considerable profit. A lot of our data is "circulated" by ourselves, through online shopping, forums, portals or even by not reading the terms and conditions of the websites, portals and applications we use. There are, of course, legal regulations as a shield, but many of the laws are being circumvented by global companies.
We often do not even consider where our personal data goes and how it is processed. What we seem to lack awareness of is that Internet service providers, credit card issuers, mobile phone network operators, all kinds of banking institutions or lending agencies and even pharmacies or appliance or car repair shops own it. All these institutions have vast databases of our personal data, which are, in this context, a commodity that can be sold at a considerable profit.
Data brokers
Need being the mother of invention, the data held by various types of institutions and establishments generated a need to trade in personal data. Companies offering this type of activity are known as data brokers.
Are we guilty of this ourselves?
Unfortunately, yes. Awareness of new technologies is unfortunately not matched by the speed of its development. Each and every one of us, every day, leaves behind a huge number of so-called cyber-traces, which are meticulously collected by brokers so that they can then be sold at a substantial profit. What do we mean by cyber-traces? Electronic devices have individually assigned numbers, e.g. the IP of the computer network we use to surf the internet, the MAC addresses of network cards, the IRBCsI numbers of mobile phones. All these numbers, are registered where we "reach" with the help of the device in question. So it is easy to determine our preferences, choices or needs. In many cases, we provide this type of information to service providers ourselves by registering on various portals, forgetting to read the terms and conditions or accepting the cookies of which we are informed.
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Free websites
Many of the available and very popular social networks and sites, are free. Google, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, etc. Online portals, do not require users to pay a fee. Many of us are led to believe that they 'live' on advertising, but as it turns out, advertising is only part of their revenue. Some of the applications or portals reserve the right to lifetime and irreversible access to the information we leave behind on the site. What's more, by doing so, we are giving our permission for the company to legally trade them in any way it wishes.
Can the terms and conditions be read?
The very design of privacy policy terms and conditions is such that reading them is difficult. What do the average terms and conditions look like? It is usually a very large text, about four to five pages long, in small print, with lines of text placed tightly, one below the other. This, among other things, is why we do not read the terms and conditions, all the more so given the fact that we encounter many terms and conditions every day and simply do not have the time to read them all. To cite an example, PayPal's terms and conditions are 36 275 words long and Hamlet's are 30 066.
Social networks
In addition to the popular sites and portals, it is also worth paying attention to those that are less popular but hit niches. There are instances where even the most sensitive data is sold unprivileged to the relevant companies or institutions. An example of this would be internt forums. In many of them, we post our thoughts, our experiences and experiences with the smallest details, including, for example, the course of our illnesses, our reaction to certain medications, symptoms, etc. This is an excellent database for pharmaceutical companies. This is an excellent database for a pharmaceutical company to use for its own purposes. Is this possible? Theoretically not, but by clicking "I agree" or "I have read the terms and conditions", you give your consent to the portal to use and process the data you upload.
Appropriate sorting
Global giants, which have servers with personal data, claim to have data on hundreds of millions of individuals. This number poses problems when it comes to handling this data. Hence the need to sort their holdings accordingly. This is usually done by assigning an individual number and categorising it, i.e. assigning it to a specific set. In this way, it is easier to identify groups of data, people who, for example, are interested in cars, shop at discount stores, are hunters, etc. Unfortunately, many of the profiles have absolutely complete data, including contact details.
