Recent research by the Pew Research Center reveals that more than 50 percent of all consumers are concerned about the volume of their personal data on the Internet.  Basically, every time you get online and do anything at any website with any company or anybody, that data is dissected to determine your patterns of behavior; resultant information is disseminated to marketers.  Every time you swipe a card, click, login, text, tweet, email, or call, your privacy is being compromised.  Consider a few facts:

1. The estimated number of times the online activity of an average Internet user is tracked every day is 2,000 plus.
2. Facebook and Twitter can track the activity of visitors at 1,205 and 868 of the most popular websites, respectively, on the Internet.
3. The estimated annual value to Facebook of a “very active” vs “relatively inactive” female user is $27.61 and $12,37, respectively, due to their dissemination of the information to marketers.

According to Pew Research, 86 percent of people are so worried now about their privacy that they have taken steps to conceal their digital footprints.  For example, more than 25 percent of Americans have downloaded advertisement-blocking tools so companies cannot so easily access data about you.  Every consumer needs to know that “cookies” are tiny files that marketing companies place on websites and browsers to track people’s interests and habits.  You can download programs to monitor and manage cookies, such as Evidon’s Ghostery and Mozilla’s Lightbeam, both of which are free.  Another product is PrivacyFix, or Incognito, a model on Google’s Chrome browser where all cookies can be deleted so advertisers cannot track your movements.

Consumers should consider encrypting their emails and text messages so they disappear seconds after you send them.  WhisperSystems has a free encrypted messaging service, as does Nathan Pham of San Jose, California.  A variety of new smartphones are entering the market based on their ability to be “truly private.”

Business analytics and data mining is here to stay and getting more and more sophisticated every day – for the betterment of business decision making.  But privacy concerns are increasingly a problem.  Even in college classrooms, professors can often tell online which students did what assignments and spent how much time in what chapters doing what – all designed to help with “assurance of learning,” but privacy issues arise even among students.

Source:  Based on Elizabeth Dwoskin, “Big Data:  Give Me Back My Privacy,” Wall Street Journal, March 24, 2014, R1-R4.