Your Social Media Data

Marc Tristan Z. Lo
2 min readDec 9, 2020
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Question: How much information does Google and Facebook have on you?

Question: Tech companies collect information from users to provide a highly personalized experience. What do you think are the implications of this practice?

Collecting user data allowed tech companies to have a tremendous impact to the users experience through modifications of their websites. This can provide creators more information to make appropriate decisions and create better experiences, implements iterative solutions, helps in tailor content, and allocates appropriate resource to enrich users experience. Unfortunately, different concern over internet privacy still exists such as security, privacy, anonymity, and ethical issues. Also, legal considerations can influence what type of data the companies collect, what they do with it, and their responsibilities to data users. (Taylor, Davis, & Jillapalli, 2009, p.203). Failure in handling these issues responsibly can cause significant financial and reputational damage, and potentially expose the user to legal implications.

In view of this, as privacy concern and content personalization are essential, it’s significant to create a balance between them. One way is by establishing and utilizing significant practices that would bolster consumer trust, relationship and confidence with the company services.

Reference:

Taylor, D. G., Davis, D. F., & Jillapalli, R. (2009). Privacy concern and online personalization: The moderating effects of information control and compensation. Electronic commerce research, 9(3), 203–223.

SAS Institute Inc. (2015). Finding the Right Balance Between Personalization and Privacy. SAS, 9. https://www.sas.com/content/dam/SAS/en_us/doc/research1/balance-between-personalization-privacy-107399.pdf

Ellingwood, J. (2020, October 19). User Data Collection: Balancing Business Needs and User Privacy. https://www.digitalocean.com/community/tutorials/user-data-collection-balancing-business-needs-and-user-privacy.

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