Welcome to the third part of our series on how you are giving away information for free online. All day every day we are interacting digitally with something, and every interaction is feeding into multiple algorithms that are being used to gather information about you, primarily for the purpose of serving you more ads. We’re going to learn a couple of new ways in this article and go a bit more in depth on a couple of others.
One of those additional ways is through third-party software, particularly through the use of Application Programming Interfaces (APIs). These are extremely handy tools that developers can use to customize various pieces of software or even develop their own. Though in reality, the APIs allow people not so much to develop their own software as stitch together various pieces of software into different combinations. Embedded in many of these APIs is code that will feedback your information to the parent company or to other aggregators in order to better advertise to you.
Last time, we talked about how various companies are always tracking your location. Yet, we didn’t talk much about how they do it. Everyone is of course familiar with how nearly every app on their phone asks them to share location data. That happens by accessing your phone’s GPS data. You can of course deny access and even turn off your device’s GPS feature. However, does that really protect you from being tracked? Well, it makes it harder at least. In truth, the more sophisticated companies can figure your location with a high degree of accuracy by seeing how long it takes your signal to bounce back from nearby cell towers. It’s simple triangulation.
We also mentioned photos last time. How do companies use that against you? Well, if you have kids and share pictures of them online, you can bet you are going to get advertisements for toys, kids’ clothes, and family vacations. Naturally, all of that will be cross-referenced with every other bit of information that you’ve shared, ensuring you’ll not only get ads for Disney World but the specific parks within that are most likely to appeal to you. If there are pictures of friends on your social media don’t be surprised if you get some of the same ads since those people are included in the incessant cross-referencing.
That reminds me; stop sharing so much. So many people share so many details online unnecessarily that it is possible to put together a decent biography on them just by gathering all those details. You have to be very conscious of this since even people who think they are being careful will let bits and pieces drop over time.
Stop letting them collect so much data on you. Go into your settings and disable personalized advertising, turn off your location sharing, app access to your contact lists, get a VPN, stop sharing everything on social media. All you’re doing is letting these companies sell you things you probably don’t need or even want and helping them shove you into a box. In a way, this is the most nefarious aspect of the whole thing, they’ll make sweeping assumptions about you based on a few tidbits of information and instantly categorize you in a way that may or may not be legitimate. People are more complicated than what can be captured by an algorithm. Someone might both enjoy trap shooting and drive a Prius. Or another person might enjoy reading philosophy in a coffee shop sipping on a latte and then go home and watch John Wick.
It’s time people broke out of these boxes that mega corporations have been trying to force them into. Fortunately, TARTLE exists to help people do exactly this. With us, you can get out of the algorithms and take back control of your digital destiny.
What’s your data worth? Sign up and join the TARTLE Marketplace with this link here.
