cap-ahuang
Abstract: I hope to study about how companies gather and use data.
Title: Data exchange.
Background: Consumer data refers to all personal, behavioral, and demographic data that is collected by marketing companies and departments from their customer base. To some extent, data collection from customers intrudes into customer privacy.
Purpose: My goal of this project is to study and understand how companies gather data, use data, and how to protect ourselves online(stay anonymous).
What will you measure, research or learn? I will research how companies gather data, use data, and how to protect ourselves online
How will you measure it, what will success look like?: Success will look like a paper teaching us about the dangers of online data collection, how it affects us, how it affects our self freedom, and how we can stay protected online.
Tools/resources needed: people, stuff, places to work, local resources, collaboration resources: google, internet, my room, laptop, power source, snacks
What you used/need?: I will use news websites
Why is it credible or needed?
How are you going to use it/was it used?
Impact and legacy (HPA, local, global): what legacy will this leave? how will this impact HPA, our community and the world?: This research will teach all our generations how to stay safe, protect our privacy, and stay anonymous online.
-Research what/how data, is being collected by companies.
•customer data on metrics, from demographic data to behavioral data
•"Customer data can be collected in three ways – by directly asking customers, by indirectly tracking customers, and by appending other sources of customer data to your own,"
•Companies will also dig deep into their own customer service records to see how customers have interacted with their sales and support departments in the past to see what the consumer liked and disliked on a grand scale.
•In addition to collecting data, companies can also purchase it from or sell it to third-party sources.
-Research what companies are doing to collect our information
•Data is turned into knowledge for those companies. they run the data through an algorithm or ai which sorts out personalized profiles of consumers, observing what their interests and behaviors are.
•Companies use data to:
Improve constumer service
refine/polish their marketing strategy
buy/sell data
secure their data with your data
-Research ways we can protect our data and selves online
•The European Union's General Data Protection Requirements (GDPR) lays out the rules of data capture, storage, usage, and sharing for companies, and stiff penalties for those that fail to comply. Companies that fail to abide by the rules set out within the GDPR face 20 million Euro fines or up to 4 percent of annual revenue, whichever is higher.
why do companies want data?
•1. Data Can Develop and Uncover Relationships
•2. Data Can Explain And Improve Your NPS
•3. Data Can Be Invaluable For Customer Service
•4. Data Can Generate New Ideas
•5. Data Can Predict Consumer Behaviors
•6. Data Can Be Currency
•7. Data Can Improve Physical Spaces
•8. Data Can Help You Infer What You Don’t Know
•9. Data Can Be A Great Predictor
•10. Data Can Help Consumers
•11. Data Can Highlight Consumer Pain
•12. Data Can Be A Reflection Of The Company
•13. Data Can Be The True Voice Of The Customer
•14. Data Can Know Customers Better Than They Know Themselves
•15. Data Can Be Overwhelming—Collect Carefully
-cookies.
Cookies are created when you visit a website. They are used to store bits of information about your interactions with the website, which the web server can use later when processing your sessions. They can also be used to track websites you visit, even after closing the original website.
Email tracking is another method. With this, companies don’t just learn that a recipient has opened an email, but also where it was opened and on what device. Over 40% of emails sent around the world are tracked,
Logging in sites using your email may alow them to see your persoanl data, like your email, name, dob, etc.
Another way data companies obtain your data is through website registrations. More and more websites now expect you to register to access the website’s content. Some websites appear to have been created largely for the purposes of obtaining data.
Another major source of data for data companies are surveys – this was at the heart of the 2018 Cambridge Analytica scandal. This includes things such as personality quizzes, online games and tests, and more. When a company asks you to rate a product, your opinion may benefit many other companies.
-data mining
data mining - the practice of examining large databases in order to generate new information.
•Data mining is a process used by companies to turn raw data into useful information. By using software to look for patterns in large batches of data, businesses can learn more about their customers to develop more effective marketing strategies, increase sales and decrease costs. Data mining depends on effective data collection, warehousing, and computer processing.
•Data mining involves exploring and analyzing large blocks of information to glean meaningful patterns and trends. It can be used in a variety of ways, such as database marketing, credit risk management, fraud detection, spam Email filtering, or even to discern the sentiment or opinion of users.
•Warehousing is an important aspect of data mining. Warehousing is when companies centralize their data into one database or program. With a data warehouse, an organization may spin off segments of the data for specific users to analyze and use.
•However, in other cases, analysts may start with the data they want and create a data warehouse based on those specs. Regardless of how businesses and other entities organize their data, they use it to support management's decision-making processes
Introduction & Goals
Many companies are collecting large amounts of consumer data, but the majority of us don’t even know what they do with it. To start off, let me ask you a question: What is consumer data, and what do companies do with it? Consumer data is personal, behavioral, and/or demographic information collected by marketing/department companies from their customer base. A few examples of consumer data, companies are trying to collect may be your credit card number, your phone number, email address, where you live, where you shop, what websites you visit, and how you act. To some extent, data collection from customers intrudes into customer privacy. Companies gather this type of data in order to improve customer service, refine/polish their marketing strategy, buy/sell data, and to secure their data with your data. My goals are to show what these consumers are giving to companies, how companies share/sell/trade data, and ways we can protect our privacy.
Implementation & Challenge
How do companies gather data? What do they do with the data? How does it affect the consumers? What are some ways I can protect our privacy? So far in my project, I’ve learned that companies use gathering techniques such as data mining, phishing, emails, website cookies, signing up, surveys, and plain out just asking. Some companies will even dig further into their own customer service records to see how customers interacted with their sales and support departments in the past to see what the consumer liked and disliked on a grand scale. Once companies gained enough information, they can then turn that information into knowledge, self data protection, or into cash flow by selling/trading data to third parties. The companies’ actions allow many more companies access to our information and can lead to consumers getting unwanted attention, marketing, and scams. Some companies have faulty security and can lead to consumer data leaks. Some challenges I face are researching topics, as informative articles do not go in too deep about data gathering/usage.
HOW TO AVOID THEM
Impact & Legacy
The opportunity to go research into something that I’ve been wondering about for a long time is a blessing. I’ve learned many things about privacy and what people can view in our personal lives. A few things I’ve learned so far are the consumers are viewed as the product, and the data buying parties are the consumers. I have also learned that everything you put or type online will be saved by a company or another. I wish to educate many people that many of their actions on the web will be permanently saved and stored somewhere, unknowingly without their knowledge. A logical backup project would be about the dangers of information leaks. It could affect you online and irl. People can sell your information to insurance companies to charge you more for health insurance or to robbers, telling them wear you hide your valuables.
Extreme measures -
Always use a premium vpn service with no-track (does not track your websites nor collect your data) when connecting to the internet. Examples of great non-track vpns are ExpressVPN, NordVPN, and CyberGhost. Use Tor Browser. Tor browser is a web proxy. It hides your IP address by redirecting your ip through over seven-thousand relays to protect your location and internet usage from anyone.
Use anonymous search engines like “DuckDuckGo.”
Use a Virtual-Machine. A program that acts like a computer, inside your pre-existing computer.
Before opening any browsers, you should close everything app and unnecessary programs running in your computer background. This reduces the opportunities people can pinpoint you. They can match the running programs of your “protected” computer to your “unprotected” computer whenever you turn your protection programs off.
Use “The Amnesiac Incognito Live System (TAILS)” as a vm operating system. TAILS eaves no trace of any user activity nor the operating system itself on your computer. TAILS cannot save cookies or file to your hard-drive without directly asking it to do so. If the operating system detects any non-anonymous connections, it will automatically block them. TAILS can be loaded and accessed on a usb drive.
Keep all your personal information securely offline, either on a different computer offline or on hardcopy.
Typing “$ sudo apt-get remove zeitgeist zeitgeist-core zeitgeist-datahub python-zeitgeist rhythmbox-plugin-zeitgeist geoclue geoclue-ubuntu-geoip geoip-database whoopsie” into the command prompt will stop all geolocation services.
You can force change your ip by unplugging your modem and replugging it.
Finally, don’t talk to anyone online, change your speech pattern, and never give any information to anyone.
If all else fails, cut off electronics from your life.
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Project Implementation Guideline
The purpose of the Project Plan is to take your proposed idea and build out a plan for how you will make that idea a reality. Whereas the Formal Proposal serves to introduce and describe your project to an uninformed reader (an external audience), the Project Plan is an internal document that lays out the major phases and milestones for how you will achieve your goals.
Write your Plan of Implementation first, then on paper or digitally (you can use Google sheets or Doc, or use free project management software like Trello, Basecamp, or Asana) to build your sections and copy the milestones into those sections as tasks. Copy the descriptions written in the plan (into a document or project management software) as the descriptions for the sections and tasks as you create them.
Rubric and Guideline
Basic Expectations & Formatting
? Turned in digitally as a PDF through the Haiku dropbox and posted to your ISR blog (also as a PDF)
? File name should follow the format: “Project Plan - Your Last Name” For example: “Project Plan - Schorn”
? Written component is 300 - 800 words in length
? Text should be single-spaced, 11 pt font (Choose a clean, professional font such as Times New Roman, Arial, Helvetica, or Georgia)
? Consistent font and text formatting throughout document
? Include your name, course name, instructor name, and project/product title at the top of the document
Plan of Implementation
? In 2-3 sentences describe the different phases of your project and how they relate to one another. You must break down your project into at least four phases. These phases can be chronological, or tied to distinct elements of your product.
? In a bulleted scaffold, lay out your project phases and the major milestones of each phase. You must have at least three milestones for each phase. Each phase and milestone should have a short (1-2 sentence) description.
? This is a formal/professional document. Your writing should meet the basic standards of clean english prose: no spelling errors, no major grammatical issues, correct punctuation, etc.
Project Management Build-out
? Create sections in the style of the model project. You should have a section for each phase described in your Plan of Implementation, as well as Deliverables, Research, and Miscellaneous sections.
? Create tasks for all known deliverables and milestones, with deadlines and descriptions per your teachers Guidelines (approximate deadlines are acceptable for this initial build-out)
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