this post was submitted on 25 Sep 2023
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A lot of people don't seem to understand that each individual bit of data is often not valuable in itself, but it is as part of a whole.
Basically, everything there is to know about you is a jigsaw puzzle. Many companies out there want that finished image, so they pay a premium for each individual piece of the jigsaw, and the companies you give your data to everyday are selling those pieces.
This might be a stupid question, and I don't know if anyone would even have the knowledge to answer... but is this data ever audited? Other than possible lawsuits, what prevents me from randomly generating data points for my customers and selling them to these companies? I assume they are cross referencing with other data sets and they could catch on quickly?
When you sell fraudulent data you get sued for fraud. You can sell low quality data if you advertise it as such.
If you create fraudulent data like adnausium you'll likely just get banned from Google.
A lot of this data is given for free in exchange for analytics from FB or Google on ad conversion...
"Big dat"a has become a buzz word, but it's a very real, potent and also frightening thing.