Technology has been more than useful in today’s era when it comes to building businesses, expanding businesses, and marketing in general. One branch stems out from this idea: How has the technological boom impacted how corporate America utilizes its users seemingly private online information to benefit the company, not the user? A large misconception is what people think is done with their information versus what is really done with it. Privacy implications play out in the open space of the internet (Dublon). Distorted perceptions come about through people’s own ideas and being fed misinformation (Carrol). This affects any common internet user as it holds all of their information that they put out online, information which can be used by companies …show more content…
To gain more customers, there are some websites that will sell collected data on users to other companies to advertise to people. Most commonly, data brokers are the ones that deal with distributing online information to third party candidates. They will gather and sell data- to either businesses or to other brokers. It is then used to create targeted ads for consumers. This industry makes easy money doing this; for instance Acxiom, a large broker, disclosed that it received over $800 million in revenue in 2015 (Naylor). Part of the general public believes that private information that they put online is just between them and that specific website. In actuality, anything that has been posted on the internet can be accessed by anyone. Much of the information online is aggregated to create ads for one or more people. Targeting specific ads is done by tracking IP addresses from which information came from and delivering advertisements. This is done not on shopping websites, but any site, such as the New York Times. CBS correspondent Steve Kroft and Facebook’s Director of Public Privacy, Ashkan Soltani, went to