Why Companies Want Your Data
Whether we realize it or not every time we make decisions online ranging from website browsing to idling on a webpage, we are serving up data. Learning this information can be jarring, especially with some of the recent phenomena surrounding mass data–breaches. It would be misleading to say that these collectors are not using this personal information, though it may be comforting to learn exactly how.
The first thing that I want to clarify is the truth to a common misconception; companies are almost always not using your information against you. The actual use of your information is quite contrary to what is widely believed and is instead actually used for you.
It is important to remember that the companies that will ultimately be receiving your personal data are actually businesses. Regardless of what we would like to believe about any one industry versus another, every business costs money to run and money cannot be spent without having it first. There are often hundreds to thousands of businesses in industries trying to garner your business while offering you highly similar products. Input costs will only tend to fluctuate as the size of the business does and lucrative markets are not kept secret for very long. Companies really make their money by reaching out to the consumer through marketing.
Similar to participating in a group conversation, the more that something speaks to you, the more inclined you are to listen; this is exactly how targeted marketing works. Consumer data is typically used by data professionals (like myself) to input into predictive models like clustering and recommender systems. These kinds of models are used to serve you marketing of certain products or services based on your demographic activity or product/service interaction. The nature of these projects does require some personal information but does not tend to care about any individual person in particular. Things like your height, weight, SSN, bank account, and even your name are things that businesses do not need to use nor even want to know. In fact, if anyone is asking you for anything beyond your name and general location it is probably not a legitimate operation to begin with. Your personal information is recorded and then treated as any other record. Even something as harmless as your name is almost always ignored and just assigned a unique identifier to recall singular records.
The last thing to remember is that although your information will not typically be used against, you you should still be weary of who you are giving it to. There will be times that you are presented with barriers to entry when trying to get more information out of a company. Special promotions, early access to products, and supplementally valuable will be offered to you in an information trade.
It is easy to signup for something without realizing what you are really signing up for. If you don’t want to hear from a company, don’t give them the means of reaching out. It may be painful to hear, but companies do not want to get to know you but instead how you can impact their business decisions. Unless you are particular about an alphanumeric sequence that is used to reference you, I would say to give information to the companies that you know and trust but never more than you would give to your Uber Eats driver.