Online Quizzes & Facial Analytics: Who's Really Profiting?

I still check my Facebook on a daily basis. Like many people, I can't help it. I've contemplated deleting my account a thousand times over the past few years, but still can't bring myself to do so. The reason: probably the same as most people, I can't risk losing contact with the several hundred friends, acquaintances, and co-workers I've made over the years. I don't have their phone numbers and probably never will. I rely on FB to be my backup in case I ever need to contact those people. Why do I still check my FB so often? I suppose I like seeing what people are talking about. I like to see what's trending, what the political conversation is, and hearing about how a friend that I haven't talked to in years just lost their dear cat. As a matter of fact, within in the past year, I found out that a friend of mine died. We had been chatting on FB- messenger and contemplating meeting up. If not for FB, I wouldn't have even known he had died. Sadly, FB has become a part of my life. However, it's important to recognize that even though we may rely on FB to keep up with friends and family, we understand that what we contribute, like, and post creates a digital footprint of our lives that is analyzed and monitored through sophisticated algorithms utilized by add agencies and the government.

It's not exactly a new thing, online quizzes constantly show up in our feeds. They claim to tell us what our education level is based on just ten questions. They analyze our faces to tell us what our ethnic backgrounds are or tell us what great person in history we're connected to. It's all great fun. Friends brag about their scores and challenge the rest of us to see if we can do better or to see what awesome comic book character we best represent. However, what most people fail to recognize, is that these "free" apps are not free at all. Sure, they're loaded with ads that we have become very good at ignoring, but that's not where the real money comes from. In fact, your'e not the customer here, your'e the product. These sites are doing nothing more than mining you for personal information.

I feel like I'm probably preaching to the choir here, but the purpose of these apps could be considered a bit sinister. I mean, obviously it's information gathering. Big ad agencies create these apps and probably pay up the wazoo to do so. The information that we freely provide gets sorted and analyzed for the purpose of targeting us for specific advertisers. It's pretty obvious, we're all pretty aware of how good they are at it. I looked on Amazon the other day for a new dog collar and the next day my FB was full of dog collar ads. Obviously, all the big online companies share their data -Google, Facebook, Yahoo, Twitter, etc. They track our every key stroke made online. The question that I pose, however, is how much information is too much information?

Everything we look at, everything we type, like, or spend time looking at is calculated into our online footprint. If you use the internet, you are a part of a specific demographic and companies have paid millions to own this information. Okay, fine. I suppose that was the inevitable direction of the market. However, at what point should we limit the information we freely provide? We all know that advertisers are not the only ones using FB and Twitter to monitor our thoughts and actions. Edward Snowden gave up his American way of life to reveal what many of us already suspected, that the government is also very interested in this information. Almost no one is unaware of what the NSA is and does anymore. They monitor and store emails and text messages of presumably everyone. If you type or even say key words, you may likely be flagged for investigatory purposes. It seems pretty safe to say that big ad agencies are not the only ones paying absurd amounts of money for information.

There comes a point at which we need to limit the information we share. These online quizzes are a trap and those face analyzers are not just there so you can see what you would look like as the opposite gender. They exist so that the already bloated bureaucracy of the American government can save that information and use it at a later point in time. How they use it is up to our imaginations and I would submit that whatever possibility one can imagine is likely possible. I'm not suggesting that every three letter agency and the employees that reside within -whom could likely access your personal information- is up to no good, but clearly we've witnessed abuses of power before. One need only be aware of recent FISA abuses. What I am suggesting, however, is that with the possibility of our personal information being used or abused in a fashion not of our liking, it makes a lot of sense to keep it to ourselves.

So, next time you come across an internet quiz or some kind of face analyzer, ask yourself this: what's being purchased here and who's purchasing it?