Blog Post 5: Data Collection

John Borg

            Last semester, I took a seminar on social media and its effects on journalism and, during one session about targeted advertisements, my professor told the class a rather disconcerting story that particularly stood out. A few years ago, a branch of the department store, Target, started to mail a teenage girl in Minneapolis coupons for diapers, formula and other essentials for raising a baby. Her father, obviously very agitated, went to the Target and demanded that it would stop sending the unnecessary mail, claiming the store was “trying to encourage her to get pregnant.” The manager apologized but, a few days later, the father called the store with a different message: his daughter was, in fact, pregnant. It turns out that Target was able to predict the girl’s situation because of the information her social media accounts and other companies sold to the department store; based on information such as her Internet searches, Target was able to run the data through an algorithm that predicts whether or not a woman is pregnant.

This is the reality that we live in; because of the Internet age, anything we do electronically, from the websites we visit to the photos we share, is processed and turned into a sellable, lucrative good. This can be used for a variety of motives, such as the economic intentions in the Target example above or, more disturbingly, for the secretive purposes of our government that we have grown familiar with in this class. Julian Sanchez’s article for Slate highlights the method with which the government works with various companies in order to obtain the information they have gathered about their customers. These actions, which are just some of the many ways our government keeps track of those it represents, have even stood up to legal questioning, as seen with the Supreme Court’s controversial Smith ruling.

We learned last week that the government has no problems going to extreme lengths in order to obtain as much information as possible. Thus, this week’s readings about agencies such as the NSA working in tandem with various companies to get this crucial data did not really shock me. What resonated with me the most was what Ethan Zuckerman claimed in his piece for The Atlantic about how the American public, every individual in this country, is now becoming a product. We are no longer valued as humans, but as information. I am not saying that we should be terrified to log into Facebook or make a phone call, but its important to realize our information is being used in a very specific and demeaning manner without our consent. Objectification in this manner leads to objectifications in other situations. If the government can see privacy rights as a minimal obstacle that can be glossed over in order to use our information for their benefit, it could, potentially, construe some of our other hard-fought and inalienable rights, such as freedom of speech and assembly, in order to better fit into its goals. According to Zuckerman, we have come to expect omnipresent surveillance to the point that even the Snowden files failed to ignite “organized, public demand for reform and change.” Without offering any opposition, we only reinforce on our government that it is acceptable to compromise our liberties and treat us, in a sense, as less than human.

We need to accept the situation for what it is. Our most basic is not being used for just predicting pregnancies or personalizing ads; the government manipulates it for suspect and controversial purposes. If our personalized information, the things that make us who we are, is really so important in today’s society, then it should be worth monitoring and protecting, even more so because we know no entity out there will do it for us.