The data we willingly or unwittingly provide to companies works for them

By Lethbridge Herald on November 22, 2024.

GUEST OPINION
Dan O’Donnell

I’ve been trying to increase the number of kilometres I walk every day.

Most workdays, according to Google, I walk about 800 metres to and from the parking lot at the university and another 800 with the dog in the morning and evening — so about 3.2 km in total.

On weekends, I try to do a bit more. Without the hill at the university, though, it’s harder. I’ve started doubling the length of my dog walks on Saturdays and Sundays.

At this point, your eyes are probably starting to glaze over. 

Nothing is more boring than hearing somebody talk about their fitness routine — especially when they throw in the data. How Fitbit counts their steps and Oura tracks their REM cycles. There are apps to measure every aspect of your life: from how fast your heart is beating to how happy you feel at the end of the day.

You don’t even need to be a fitness fanatic. I know how much I walk because my phone has Google Maps on it. And my wife’s new earbuds offer to track her sleep — provided she subscribes to the manufacturer’s app.

That, of course, is the issue. While the data these apps collect can be useful to us, it’s even more useful to the companies behind them. 

Knowing how I get around town helps Google refine its traffic predictions, but it also lets them model my behaviour and predict which kinds of ads they should show me.

These data become even more powerful when combined with everything else we tell them: the things we watch on YouTube or TikTok, who our friends are on Facebook, what we post to Instagram or X, and the things we buy on Amazon. 

Taken together, this builds a remarkably accurate picture of who we are and what we’re likely to do.

That’s why it can sometimes seem like our phones are spying on us. Mention to a friend that you’re thinking of taking a holiday, and suddenly you see ads for flights to Jamaica. But these companies don’t need to eavesdrop. They know you so well from the data you’ve provided that they can predict what you want — sometimes before you know it yourself.

Whether this bothers you depends, I suppose, on your perspective. I recently read two articles in The Guardian that took very different approaches.

The first was by an investigative journalist who had recently been sued by the subject of one of her stories. 

Her advice was to hide as much as possible: pay in cash, use encrypted messaging, and get off Facebook and X. She had been forced to hand over her emails and browsing history during the case and was shocked at how much it revealed.

The second was by a journalist exploring Google’s new NotebookLM app. This app lets you upload articles, documents, and videos, then use AI to summarize and analyze them. His point was that you could create a personal assistant that knows exactly how you write and what you find interesting in the things you read.

I’m not sure where I stand on this. On the one hand, I’ve abandoned social media apps like Facebook and Twitter because I oppose the way their algorithms drive people to ever more extreme positions, and I don’t want large companies tracking my conversations. But I still use services like Gmail, chatbots, and payment apps that I know are intrusive — because I find them so convenient.

Traditionally, we’ve been suspicious of people who collect too much information. It’s illegal to open someone else’s mail, and the police still need a warrant to tap your phone.

But we now give far more personal information away for free to companies, which face few restrictions on how they use it.

So I’m on the fence about that personal assistant. But earbuds that can measure my sleep? Where do I sign up?