Its no surprise that in the Information Age, information is... well... valuable. On this giant 'web' of interconnected servers and clients we call the internet, our personal information is a gold mine -except we call it data mining instead of gold mining and you can't make an engagement ring with it. However dating sites charge a heavy premium on helping you find someone you might want to give an engagement ring to.
It all starts with the sign up process. Whether its a dating website, an online forum about the car you drive, or facebook, if you want to communicate with others on that site you have to sign up. But hey, its free! Companies around the world have figured out how to pay for all these really cool products we want, without even charging us for them! They pay for the servers, the bandwidth, a place to put the servers, people to make sure they're running, and then let us use it for free! Makes sense right? Didn't think so. So how exactly do they make money? Advertising of course! So how does advertising generate enough revenue to keep this monolithic website going? Make sure you're advertising the right stuff to the right people! Wait... how do you do that? Oh yeah, just track the people you're advertising to, figure out what they like, and put some ads up on the site they're viewing. Maybe telling them about your interest in 90's cyberpunk when you signed up wasn't quite as innocuous as you thought.
See how quickly that gets hairy? As a matter of fact, if I wanted to know where people reading this are from I just have to click a few links and I'll have a map in front of me, with orange circles indicating the locations of incoming traffic. Now of course, that map doesn't tell me who those orange circles are representing, just that they were there when they accessed the page. So, I have no idea who you are unless you leave me a nice little comment... but Google does. IP addresses are given out by internet service providers, and they usually make you "Sign Up" just like every other website. They also keep that information, and tie it to the IP address you have at any given time. With the right tools, companies like Google, Facebook, and Blizzard can find out where exactly you are based just on the IP address you have to use to get to their product. Apropos Blizzard claims they can track weather phenomena based on players who are not online.
So, now some log file knows where you are and another knows you like Netrunner. But they are in two completely different places, so the information isn't tied together. Darn, Facebook won't be able to sell you the newest set of cards from the game. Wait! What if we find a way to link those two pieces of information together and sell them to Facebook! We'd probably make a mint right? Sorry, these guys beat you to it. So did many other companies like them.
The point please... As the old saying goes, nothing is free. As deplorable as it seems for companies to track where we go on the internet, and what our interests are, we unknowingly give up that information as a sort of bartering token in exchange to fulfill our need to update our statuses every 15 minutes. Don't worry though, its nothing new. Equifax, Transunion, and Experian have been doing it for years! Ok, maybe they're not checking to see if you like to buy shoes on eBay, but they do have a nice list of all the bills you have. Also, when and if you paid them. It would be terribly tedious to look through all of this when you're trying to get a loan for a TV at BestBuy so they found a way to encapsulate all that information in a number ranging from 0 to 800. Oh, you want to know what your score is? That'll be 20 bucks please. Or you can listen to this funny guy and goto freecreditreport.com where you will once more trade your personal in formation to get... your personal information.
Ok, so what now? Fortunately, its fairly difficult for these companies to actually verify the information you put into all these forms without a subpoena. If you don't like what they're doing, lie to them; and I mean LIE. Everything from your name to your taste in food. Tell them your pet tiger's name is bobby and that your walls are painted orange. Or play Netrunner for real, and try to extract your data from the matri... I mean internet.
Whether or not this is an acceptable practice is a matter of opinion. My opinion is that everyone should know that it is being done. Ultimately the decision is ours to make; use the product and pay for it with information, or quite simply, don't use it. However, most websites and applications don't tell you they are doing it. I didn't know about RapLeaf until I read this article, but I wasn't surprised when I read it. If you are, think about how much you value your information, and whether not you're willing to sell it before you give any website your actual information. Most tracking companies claim the data collection to be benign because its anonymous, but that isn't entirely true, and even if it is: they're still tracking you, they just don't record your name. Just your IP address. Woops.
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