How Your Private Data Is Being Used 

Cell Phone cameras [1]

One major factor of your private data being used is someone hacking your cell phone camera. One of the main ways Hackers can gain access to your phone and phone camera is by putting fake apps up on the apple or android play store. Victims who download apps like this will be hacked without even knowing.

You can find out if your phone has been hacked by looking for these six signs.

Noticeable decrease in battery life

Sluggish performance

High data usage

Outgoing calls or texts you didn't send

Mystery pop-ups

Unusual activity on any accounts linked to the device

Reward Programs [2]

Another big data collector is reward programs. Reward programs are set up by corporations to give you money if you shop in specified online stores. For the consumer reward programs seem harmless and fun. But under the curtains all these reward programs are actually a big data collector. Big companies take your private info and sell it to bigger corporations like google, or amazon. Those companies then have access to your private data. And can know everything about you online. One thing big retailers do is target advertisements by using your private data to show you what you might wanna see.

Targeted Advertising [3]

Examples of targeting advertising

Geographical — targeting audience from specific country, state or city. Some advertising platforms offer even more granular geo-targeting, down to the city block. It is also known as "hyperlocal" and is often used for mobile ad campaigns and Facebook.

Placement-based — targeting specific websites, pre-selected from the list of available ones on the ad network. This type of targeting is essential for advertisers in case an ad network doesn't offer full fledged contextual targeting solution across all of its websites. For instance, if you're an advertiser selling boats, you'd be more interested in targeting sites that are related to hunting/fishing, since they are frequented by your potential customers.

Time-based — allows advertisers to determine time slot or day of the week to show their ads.

Device-based — enables advertisers to display ads based on users' device, OS version or browser version.

Demographic — targeting method used by advertisers to display ads to certain audience segments , based on parameters like age, gender, marital status, education, etc.

Digital Rights Management [4]

One tool that helps companies and creators on the internet is Digital Rights Management. Digital right management prevents your content from getting stolen. Or there are software programs where you can tune what your users are allowed to do. Some features you can adjust are if the users can save or edit what you worked on, if they are allowed to share it to others, and much more. Digital right management can also help creators prevent unauthorized access to their work. And lastly it can help companies keep their private data from the public eye, and rival companies, and restrict sensitive info.

Monitoring Software [5]

Lastly I will be talking about Computer Monitoring software. Computer Monitoring Software records important info on your computer. It can tell you things like your system login name, it captures applications used, and finally it records visited urls.

My Three Questions webpage