Trade-off between privacy and more complete and bettermarkets

Currently, there are many complaints about threats to our privacy. Wikileaks has released many documents suggesting many secret service agencies are spying on private communication and information; however, Wikileaks itself is a threat to privacy as well, when it releases some private information. In addition, the technology has made recording information much easier and the information collected is much more detailed. Once the information is more detailed, personal and private information is more likely to be collected. In addition, as people's acts are not completely unpredictable or unreasonable, when we are doing some data analysis, it is not surprising to find out how some people are likely to behave under some certain circumstances. Then it is not surprising that once companies have knowledge about such information, they can improve their marketing strategies or even people may say manipulate their customers' behaviour.

It hurts people's hurting when they feel they are manipulated by companies. However, people may not be at the risk of leaking their personal information if there are a good management and a complete regulation of information. Firstly, when doing data analysis, the process is about to build models to show the relationships and links between different factors, rather than focusing on individual information. Once they collect the information, if they do not have the identity information (such as national insurance numbers), it is very difficult for them to trace the information back to their customers and know their customers' detailed information. Secondly, if companies do have a large number of customers, they do not really care about each individual customer's characteristics, so they are unlikely to really manipulate their customers individually. Thirdly, the problem does not occur when the information is collected, the problem usually occurs when the information is stored. Therefore, maybe we should focus on how to save the information securely rather than how to stop personal information from being collected by their service providers, because personal information being collected by your service providers is inevitable.

I think that since more and more information is being collected, people will be forced to store the information more securely and more regulations about information will be released; however, the amount of information being collected will increase continuously.