Culture Change & Data Security

Big data has faced numerous scandals in recent news including Facebook’s Cambridge Analytica, Target’s security breach, and more; however, consumers still use Facebook and shop online. This begs the question: how has big data changed our culture over the years? Even when researching this topic and looking for sources, I am asked whether or not I accept cookies on blogs and websites across the internet. For anyone who may not already know, cookies are messages that bots place on your browser when you visit a website (Indiana University, n.d.). They track you across the internet and give advertisers data so that they can retarget you if you abandoned your cart with items in it or visited their site and searched a certain page. This is just one way data has changed our culture and countries in the EU are cracking down on cookies and other online privacy issues.

https://www.european-business.com/infographics/data-privacy-infographics/

Data of course helps companies make decisions about what products to sell, where to open new stores, and so on. Consumers have become quite used to entering their contact information such as first and last name, email address, phone number, and home address. It’s literally become part of our culture and an expected step to enter online contests, join a group, open an account on certain sites. No one (or at least that I know of) reads the fine print when updating to the new version of iOS or something similar because our culture has made it unreasonable to think of taking the time to scroll through pages and pages of legal 

jargon.

What are we giving up? In an article for Good Housekeeping, Ian Marlow, a cyber security expert, discusses the potential dangers of providing your phone number online or even over the phone to a ‘representative’. Reverse phone searches can give someone a name, address, previous addresses, and even relatives’ personal information (Schreiber, 2016). This issue permeates across the internet and it is going to take an even larger culture change to revert back to valuing privacy!

Indiana University. (n.d.). What are cookies? Retrieved from Knowledge Base: https://kb.iu.edu/d/agwm

Schreiber, S. (2016, November 21). Experts Say You Need to Think Twice Before Giving Out Your Cell Number. Retrieved from Good Housekeeping: https://www.goodhousekeeping.com/life/money/news/a41565/phone-number-cyber-security/