Everyone has experienced that creepy feeling of seeing an ad pop up on their Facebook feed of something they’d just been googling the day before or felt paranoid that Alexa is listening when she chimes in all of a sudden without being prompted. When you feel that invasion of privacy, it makes you question what type of information is being fed to marketers and advertisers. With new technology comes new apps that make it easy to upload and share our information with family, friends, and followers. There truly is an app for anything, and the more we use technology, the more information we are putting out there to be discovered.
The photo storage app “Ever” was just exposed as using facial recognition software on users’ photos to train artificial intelligence products sold to law enforcement and surveillance agencies. While this sounds like a valiant cause, people who have used this app feel a little duped realizing that their information was used for something other than what the app advertised.
People use Amazon’s Alexa to ask questions, make grocery lists, listen to music, and go shopping. In this article about Amazon’s Alexa, it’s revealed that even though people delete their voice history, some sort of record still remains. This is similar to many different applications on a smartphone or computer. We often discover deleted text messages, photos, or files.
The bottom line is that once information is out there, some sort of record usually remains, even if it’s been deleted. As privacy becomes more of an issue, it will be interesting to see if people stop uploading to apps and the cloud to protect their privacy, or if they continue to feed the monster with personal information because it’s convenient.
