Who should be interested in my data?

We often hear this objection when we talk about data protection. And hand on heart: who hasn't thought "What's going to happen?" when clicking on data protection declarations or filling out a form?

At first glance, it really does seem as if we are far too unimportant for anyone to bother analysing our data. However, digital technologies have now made it much easier to process data. In addition, the opportunities to utilise this data profitably are increasing enormously. So there is definitely an interest in the data of every single person.  

Example: Shopping

• How often do you shop? 
  
• How much money do you spend per purchase?
• Do you buy cheap products or branded items?
• How often do you buy certain products, e.g. toiletries, cleaning products, alcohol, etc.?
• What time of day do you shop?

Picture from Peggy und Marco Lachmann-Anke on Pixabay

• Which income group you belong to.
  
• How many people live in your household.
• What your eating habits are.
• How often you clean.

• How much can I raise a price before you stop buying the product?
  
• Which products fit your profile that you have not yet bought? The company will offer you these in the next promotion.
• What offers will make you buy things that you wouldn't otherwise buy?

Source: OpenClipart-Vectors on Pixabay

Data becomes information, information becomes knowledge

Companies could learn a lot more from this data. You buy a lot of alcohol, do you have an addiction problem? You don't buy much toothpaste, perhaps you don't look after your teeth enough? The retailer is probably not interested in this, but imagine this data reaching your health insurance company. Insurance companies already use large amounts of data to categorise their customers, which ultimately determines how expensive your insurance tariff is (Source). 

You can now guess why companies are so interested in your data. Information is gained from data and knowledge is gained from information, which is used to optimise the company. If you are interested in this topic, read this article:  "You Should Worry About the Data Retailers Collect About You" from Ian Bogust.

Note

	Digital technologies are making it increasingly easy to collect, collate and analyse data. Every time we search the internet, we leave data traces; every time we buy something online, it is tracked exactly how we search for a product and how we buy it.

Why should that worry me?

In the following lessons, you will learn many more examples of why it is important to handle personal data with care. To get you started, we would like to illustrate this with two examples:

• A student is denied entry to the USA. Authorities had read her Facebook messages and wrongly assumed that she wanted to work illegally in the USA (Source).
  
• Two people requested their Alexa voice recordings from Amazon. During dispatch, the recordings were accidentally mixed up and sent to the other person (Source).
  

Let's return to the question from the beginning: "Who should be interested in my data?". You have seen from the examples: There are many reasons to be interested in your data. Data protection is therefore an important topic. In our training, you will learn everything you need to know about applied data protection in your project.

Note

	The sentence "I have nothing to hide" is wrong because it assumes that you only hide something if you have done something wrong or forbidden. However, our right to privacy allows us to keep things to ourselves in all cases, regardless of their content. Data protection protects us from unauthorised invasions of our privacy.