The more we live our lives online, the more of our personal data we surrender to various brands, channels, and platforms. While that can lead to good things, such as a more seamless experience developed specifically for you, it always helps to be wary of the dangers of data privacy (or lack thereof).
Amazon workers are listening to what you tell Alexa
We all probably have a semblance of an idea how NLP programs like Siri and Alexa work — they’re trained on sentences upon sentences of real-life conversations. Sounds reasonable, right? But what if we told you that Alexa recorded your conversations and sent them to Amazon workers, who then transcribed these in a language that Alexa can understand?
Facebook promises to stop asking you to wish happy birthday to your friend who died
It’s a conundrum unique to the digital age: what happens to your social media accounts when you die? For Facebook, the answer was easy: they memorialize your account, which requires initiative from the deceased’s loved ones. Now, Facebook’s working on an algorithm that will look for signs of life. Whether or not this new algorithm will be effective, only time will tell.
It’s time to delete your tweets. It’s not that easy.
Twitter seems to have a love-hate relationship with its users. Despite its centrist stance on political issues and its unsatisfactory UI/UX, Twitter users can’t help but keep coming back. But now that netizens are becoming more privacy-savvy, are they finally going to leave the very public platform for good? Or is Twitter going to allow its users to take matters into their own hands?
Ad saturation and over-targeting damaging people’s trust in brands
Any article on digital marketing predictions for 2019 will tell you: data privacy is set to be a hot topic for the year. But these articles will also tell you that hyperpersonalized marketing is going to be trendy. So what’s the real deal, and is there any way to strike the perfect balance between the two?
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