Slowly but surely, this has prompted users to look for better options to protect their privacy. While this doesn’t seem much of a threat initially, as the massive support for the “If you've got nothing to hide, you've got nothing to fear” catchphrase shows in practice, though, nothing could be further from the truth. Software companies can not only build models around your behavior, but they also keep a record of all of your search histories, which is then stored for later use. student in Pluralist Economics and Socio-Informatics at the University of Siegen.Īnother big elephant in the room is the loss of privacy.

“It involves customized advertising and behavior manipulation, powered by intensive gathering and cross-correlation of personal information,” points out Marvin Landwehr, a Ph.D. While this system has provided access to free information to billions of people, like almost any system in the world, it isn’t without its pitfalls.įor one, an economy sustained on amassing user data is a sanctuary for the psychological manipulation of its users. The data economy, sometimes also called surveillance capitalism as a pejorative, is an ecosystem of technology and free-market where data is collected and sold in exchange for different products and services. But as the tech world has continued to progress, so has the economy around it: it's called the data economy.

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