While recently travelling on the train from New York City to Boston, I picked up an abandoned copy of the New York Times and came across an article recapping the recent proceedings in Congress, where Mr Mark Zuckerberg was giving testimony over the data breaches and Facebook’s role in foreign interference in the 2016 US election. Further reading made me sit upright and become alarmed at how much information online consumers are actually sharing without their knowledge.

As someone who is not very IT literate, this article made me think about how unaware we are of what others may know about us. We are curious learners, obtaining information via online sources. Increasingly we stay connected to family and friends with the aid of technology. Our lives are busier and we shop online. Some of us post information via online sources, for professional purposes, via sites such as LinkedIn. In 2018, this is the way many of us function.

The New York Times article went on to describe how Facebook facilitates brands and politicians to target you. This online platform can learn almost anything about you by using artificial intelligence to analyse your behaviour. Each time we are on sites such as Facebook and we deviate into another site, or if we ‘like’ or ‘share’ our data, the information is tracked.

At St Catherine’s, I have been witness to numerous conversations and presentations to our girls about using online sites in a safe and informed manner. However, even though our girls are knowledgeable, many are unaware of what is truly happening behind the scenes of the sites they frequently use. One of the first responses of the girls is to assure us that they have strict privacy settings, but how then can Cambridge Analytica collect information from up to 87 million Facebook users without their direct knowledge? As parents and educators, I feel we also need to be better informed.

‘Lookalike audiences’ for example is a marketing service that goes beyond familiar programs and allows advertisers to target users by their ages or likes.

Around the world, governments are dealing with this differently. Privacy and third party use of data gathering is changing in Europe (GDPR), with more transparency and the requirement of direct customer consent for collection of user data.

To learn how our information is being obtained please read part of the article from the NY Times (Business) April 12 2018, by following this link.

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2018/04/11/technology/facebook-sells-ads-life-details.html