Collection of your personal life data is so fine-tuned now that maybe you should be scared. Cyber security expert and law professor Steve Weisman says, "Things aren’t as bad as you think. They are far worse as you can imagine!!! Technology is always ahead of the law. The average American has no idea how much information s/he is giving to a wide range of companies and what they are doing with it.”
Weisman says you pay for using "free" social media and loyalty programs with your personal identity. All that information can be used to create a profile of you that can be used to target you with ads, classify the riskiness of your lifestyle, or help determine your eligibility for a job. Online technology is so far advanced that just having a Facebook or Twitter account can give those companies a the right to collect and sell a lot of the user's personal information.
“They are agreeing to those user agreements, which say the company can do absolutely anything!” Weisman is also a law professor at Bentley University in Waltham, Massachusetts. His students are assigned to actually read all the way through just one of the terms of agreement they have agreed to. “They are uniformly horrified to see the rights they are giving up!”
Your information goes to many companies including marketing firms, political advisers, insurance companies and doxxers who give the information to anyone with a credit card.
Getting your name off of companies' profile lists isn't easy - but doable. Click here for a start.