The Beginning Of The D.B.E. (Data Based Economy) Boom

I saw a very interesting news article today about how more corporations are pairing up with tech giants to help improve their services by using data collection or data mining as some call it. As we all know this is not breaking news but I think people fail to realize how much their data is really worth. There is an interesting website (http://ig.ft.com/how-much-is-your-personal-data-worth/) <<linked here that shows how much your personal data could be worth to a corporate entity. Surprisingly depending on your income or job occupation and living status your data can be worth close to a dollar. Now imagine this on a scale of millions and add in a variety of corporations that wish to buy the data and this can easily turn into a billion dollar industry. Even Starbucks the popular American coffee shop chain has openly announced a partnership with IBM to mine data from people using their Starbucks app to "Better Services" Once these mega-corporations begin using these methods to make money this could harshly affect our future. For example, your insurance company buying data from Visa or MasterCard to see where you are purchasing food from and changing the price of your insurance premiums based on what type of food you like to eat. Also I may add given the rising popularity of adblock and other similar privacy enhancing browsing services people are starting to wake up to all of the data harvesting and start to fight back. (http://www.businessinsider.com/pagefair-2017-ad-blocking-report-2017-1) << an article about adblocking popularity and effectiveness from this year.

I hope this opens some eyes and some discussion about how things will really be 10-20 years from now given the rise in data mining these past couple of years. Who can we trust? Why should we allow people to sell our information? That is your choice to decide.