Personal Data as a Commodity

Some musings on how personal data is gathered and sold, prompted by a discussion about this topic in a lecture. 

I usually don't really question personal data gathering that much because I'm pretty sure I already had all of it leaked when I was a naïve child 😅 but it does raise the question of why most of this information is being gathered. An example was brought with signing up for a store loyalty card and telephone nr was asked for; I would probably provide it without much thought but the question is why would a store ever need to know your phone number like this? And this is perhaps a relatively innocent case of unnecessary data gathering. A nice "gateway drug" into a cyberpunk dystopia.

The most interesting method of database acquisition discussed was where selling the database itself was difficult so the entire company was bought instead and the database was just an "extra". Creative if nothing else. 

As a side-step one interesting opinion about OSINT of public social media being unethical—you are the one who put your own personal data out into public, you can't expect only the people you want to look at it if you don't set these settings to private??

- Stern Kittel