data tracking

They are tracking you. We all know this by now. You may not realize the extent and you may not care, but the fact is, no app is free. You pay with your privacy, and it takes significant effort to get "untracked."

As seen in The Week, here's the story of the 2014 book Dragnet Nation in which author Julia Angwin details the steps she took get away from the reach of big data.  

Julia Angwin is definitely being followed, said Michael De Groote in the Salt Lake City Desert News. Like most Americans, the former Wall Street Journal reporter lives under surveillance, her movements and purchases tracked and compiled for use by marketers and, at least potentially, the government. When she dug up some of the information that "data tracking" firms had on her, she was unnerved: “They knew I had bought underwear the week before; does anybody really need to know that?” Such information allows the firms to include her name on various lists that marketers are willing to pay for, even when the lists are inaccurate. One list, for instance, incorrectly pigeonholed her as a single mother without a college degree.

Even Angwin’s best efforts weren’t enough to win freedom from big data’s reach, said Andrew Leonard in Salon.com. “I was at best 50 percent successful,” she says. And that was after she had, among other things, gotten her name removed from 92 marketing lists and started encrypting her phone conversations and carrying her cellphone in a metal-lined wallet. In her book, Dragnet Nation, she details the steps she took so that readers can follow her lead. Our vulnerability to government and corporate snooping, she says, “is something that we will change through laws and also through being smart about what choices we make.” We are, she says, “just now starting to see the true cost of all the free services we use. Because they are not free.”

Expand your knowledge and take a quick tour through these definitions:

• aggregate data
• big data
• CDPD (Cellular Digital Packet Data)
• cleansed data
• data
• data backup
• data center
• data cholesterol
• data cleaning service
• data compression
• data dump
• data glove
• data mart
• data mining
• data recovery
• data repository
• data shadow
• data snacking
• data storage
• data store
• data storm
• data traffic
• data Valdez
• data warehousing
• database
• database front end
• database management system
• database-driven
• datagram
• datasphere
• ephemeral data
• massage the data
• portable wireless data
• social data
• ultraviolet data

FYI: The Online Tracking Information System (OTIS) is a collection of search engines which enables Environmental Protection Agency staff, state/local/tribal governments and federal agencies to access a wide range of data relating to enforcement and compliance.