Wednesday, February 8, 2012
Selling Personal Information
You may have heard of Facebook starting to sell your personal information to third party companies, but did you know that your cellphone services are already doing this? Mid October verizon wireless changed their private policies to allow them to sell your information like age, gender, and even your location to third party companies. For example if a business wanted to open a new pet store, they can buy a market report from Verizon about the designated area. The report would have information about which city block had the most foot or car traffic from people's who web history indicates that they own a pet. Although Verizon was the first to have this policy, they aren't the only ones. AT&T, Sprint, and T-Mobile are also making money of this. I think this policy is over stepping its rights, but however if I was trying to start a new business this kind of information would be very helpfully.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
4 comments:
This news is rather unsettling...It seems that companies being allowed to do this should be some kind of violation of the customers rights. Yes, the service is only meant to help other business market, but it seems it would be entirely too simple for these peoples personal information and get into the wrong hands. I feel that customers should be given the right to decide whether or not they want their personal info shared.
Do you believe this practice is a violation of your privacy?
This is a very important topic to bring up, but the sad part is that there is not really much that can be done about it. Violation of social privacy has been going on for years, since the beginning of technological advancement. As technology gets stronger, your privacy gets weaker. It's certainly beneficial that people know about this happening, but what can you do?
It is most definitely a violation of our rights. However, they are allowed to do this because it is not against the law and big companies like these will try to do anything to make more money. If these executives were in our shoes they might think differently about this situation.
Post a Comment