One person's experiment in trying to opt out of Big Data

One person’s experiment in trying to opt out of Big Data

The author was trying to prevent any company from knowing about her pregnancy:

For example, seven months in, my uncle sent me a Facebook message, congratulating me on my pregnancy. My response was downright rude: I deleted the thread and unfriended him immediately. When I emailed to ask why he did it, he explained, ‘I didn’t put it on your wall.’ Another family member who reached out on Facebook chat a few weeks later exclaimed, ‘I didn’t know that a private message wasn’t private!’

Speaking of user education problems. People have no idea how their data is being used.

Even that doesn’t quite encompass the scope of the problem: it doesn’t even occur to people that their everyday activities as they go about their lives are data. 20 years ago, if you wrote a letter to someone, or called them on the phone, that wasn’t ‘data’. Now it is.