In terms of privacy in businesses, the more technology is being developed in this world, the more people are worrying for the safety of their personal information could be negatively affected. Concerns are rising because of the risks of disclosure personal information of different stakeholders. Such the questions How can data be transmitted? Can those who collect the information ensure that the information of their customers and other parties will be used for specific purposes during transactions, not for commercial purposes (Parliament of Victoria, anon)? always exist in people’s mind whenever they are asked to provide their personal information.
In fact, there are cases prove that personal data are sold with a cheap price between companies. For instance, a New York company was selling the data of over 2,000 Australians women who are using dating services and dating applications for trading exchange purposes (Duxfield & Mitchell, 2019). The authors also mentioned about businesses are linking together to cross the list of data of both sides. The most obvious evidence for this statement is is when Facebook purchased government databases and commercial databases to cross-list with the data that they have collected from their Facebook users (Duxfield & Mitchell, 2019).
About how those personal data will benefits businesses, as stated by Matsakis (2019): “Information about you, what you buy, where you go, even where you look is the oil that fuels the digital economy”. In other words, trading personal data is a big potential market for businesses. Those databases can be used for customising advertisements to different types of customers or for retail businesses to analyse customer behaviour to make next decisions (Matsakis, 2019). In trading data, there is a phrase that we cannot avoid mentioning: data brokers. Moreover, the number of data brokers is increasing, for example United States alone has between 2,500 and 4,000 data brokers (Duxfiled & Mitchell, 2019).
However, not all personal database is used commercially. Matsakis (2019) asserted that personal behaviour on websites are used for training artificial intelligence for the purpose of enhance users’ experiences and to avoid cyber bullying. For example, YouTube, Facebook, Instagram and Twitter collect users’ billions of photos, videos, texts posts, and audio clips from around and “feed” to their machine learning algorithms to “learn” how to “see” even a smallest signs of any posts violates their social media sites’ hate-speech policy (Matsakis, 2019).
The use of data is still now argued by different stakeholders, from the businesses to politicians and law makers. The current laws only cover a part of it. For example, The European Union’s General Data Protection Requirements sets that for those companies fail to abide to rules of data capture, storage, usage and sharing will be face with the fine up to20 million Euro or 4% of annual revenue (Uzialko, 2018)