15-How we sabotage our own privacy for deals and ego

The article, “How we sabotage our own privacy for deals and ego,” describes the fact at no matter how drastic the measures you take to keep yourself off the grid, there is not possible way your information is complete private or secret. If you use a credit card, use online banking, order anything online, you are losing the privacy battle. A business consulting firm conducted a survey of 5000 digitally knowable consumers to establish their criteria for sharing their personal information and how that information might be used. Those that were survey came from the U.S., the U.K., Germany, France and Australia. the surveyed showed that when making a purchase, Americans are more likely to share data (88%), 83 % of Americans are willing to share private information with their banks. So in a nutshell, if you use a credit card, or if you make an online purchase, if you use Amazon, Ebay, or any social media site your privacy is out the window. Banks look at your purchases in order to keep you safe from credit card theft. They look at your pattern of spending money in order to detect something that is out of the ordinary. Companies do this as well to provide advertising that would spark the consumer’s interest, to draw us in to make purchases. Then they get us with the deals and sales, we share our information, make a purchase, and BAMB! our secured privacy is gone.

I am not surprised by any of the information in this article. It is no mystery that what you share online is not completely private. I for one am not to keen on sharing my information online to pay a bill or apply for any financial assistance online (scholarships, MTAG, FASFA) because you have to share so much of yourself. If someone really wanted that information they could crack the code and grab it. It’s no wonder that Identify theft is such a problem these days. When online shopping, we click and maneuver through the web to things that we want, we give our email addresses out like candy to any advertising that we want to see more about. We have Facebook, twitter, snap chat, and insta-gram so that everyone in the world can see where we are, what we are thinking, and what we are doing. The reality of it all is that we want to be in the public eye, we want people to have this information at this disposal, and we don’t want out lives to be private. Why would our bank accounts and credit card information be any different. It’s the scary truth.