What Do Google, Instagram, And The NSA Have In Common?

What do Google, Instagram, and the NSA have in common? Good morning Ms. Cosman, and 8C. I am here to explore the complex nature of your online data, and how it is collected. Your data is constantly being traded by companies, and they are making billions from it, and people with malicious intent can take this data for themselves, and the government can use this data against you.

In the past decade, some of the world’s largest companies have sold no tangible product, and have instead provided “free access to services on the internet. One massive example of this is Facebook. Mark Zuckerberg is one of the world’s richest individuals and the source of his vast wealth, Facebook, is worth over half a trillion dollars, all while being a

Parts of this information is sold and traded constantly, your private data is on the free market. Often, this data is used by the companies themselves, to advertise. This e is a relatively new form of advertising that has only appeared in the last few years, called targeted advertising. Have you ever searched online for something online, and later seen an advertisement for that same product, perhaps by a different company? ? I, for one, have had this happen many times. That wasn’t just a fluke, that was an extremely complicated program that was designed to learn what you want, and show you ads for it, by knowing what you like, Google’s, among other companies’, software can can show you ads for things that it determines are the most likely to appeal to you, with very high accuracy. Studies have shown that targeted advertising can effectively target the top 1% of people who are most likely to purchase a specific product, making it far more effective than traditional

One of the companies I mentioned, Acxiom, which is probably one of the shadiest and largest companies collecting this data, was hacked a few years ago. This hack may have revealed some key information about many of their customers, and their clients customers. Enough data may have been gathered to steal these people’s identities. Something far larger, and scarier, happened a few months ago.Researchers recently found a file on the Dark Web, which is the “less accessible” part of the internet, that contained almost one and a half usernames and passwords of random people, one of whom may be in this room. These included people’s Gmail accounts, Netflix accounts, and tons of other usernames and passwords. Security experts are still going through this immense file, but so far they have found that many of the accounts there are legitimate, and can be used by anybody. Much of the data that these companies have, as well as your accounts themselves, are accessible to clever hackers. Web security experts Symantec said “the Black Hats are winning”, which to put simply, means that the criminal hackers, also known as Black Hats, are winning. There just aren’t enough “White Hats” or “good” hackers, and the ones that there are, are being outsmarted and constantly dodged by the Black Hats. The reason for this is because there’s far more money in the illegal market than working against