"Jennifer King is director of consumer privacy at Stanford Law School’s Center for Internet and Society. She agrees that defending your data against vague enemies is completely overwhelming, and she says that until regulations change (or are enacted in the first place), you won’t be able to stop them from acquiring it. But she believes you still should try.
You may have nothing to hide, but the creepy way that cute pair of shoes follows you online is not the real risk. “One of the things we see with these different systems that can track you and infer a great deal about you is that [your information] ends up getting used adversarially against you in ways that you don’t even know,” King says. In other words, your online world could be filtered based on the information known about you. Maybe you won’t even see a job listing because you’ve been identified as a woman in her prime reproductive years. Or maybe you’ll spend more than your neighbor for those cute shoes because the online retailer knows your price. You can be disadvantaged in ways that are impossible for you to detect."
- Date Published:01/27/2020
- Original Publication:Stanford Magazine