Psych Ops Series| You need to worry about your data

Have you ever wondered how WhatsApp generates revenue? It doesn't even present you any ads? How?

#User Data- end to end encryption??😂 None sees my chats, no you are completely wrong! chat systems are accessed, there may not be a direct intervention but for sure there is going to be a system access to the bots processing the chats. For some compromised apps your entire chats along with identity is also available on the internet.

Data is analysed and structured and used by the companies that create marketing, based on data that Facebook does share your data to trusted service providers - How trusted them? Here is the image from so-called safe and extensively used messaging app

There is no thoughts, on your data is private, much of it is already public. You may not be able to see on the regular internet, of course it is available for the people who are aware of the deep web, where the tonnes of data is stored majorly for research purposes. Always remember, nothing in life comes for free.

WhatsApp - Shares the chats with other so-called trusted companies, why do they need to pay millions of dollars for the chat data.

Google -  Shares your search details on the open source platforms and even you can see about the number of searched happening. Link is here: https://trends.google.com/trends/?geo=US. 

They share the data from your Gmail also. The sharing of data is not as a raw, but structured so that's the ads can be personalized. But Google's case is quite interesting, if you are a initial company and thrive drive organic traffic many people allege that Google won't allow you to do so, to generate ads revenue 

Let's come to Facebook - You have multiple emotional reactions available to each posts, this just makes facebook understand your emotional sensitivities very well. As you know it also shares data.

After all this, you may tell let them do, what they gonna do...? Once they have the chat data, by using machine learning models and other artificial intelligence techniques they are able to estimate your behavior at a very nominal error rate and can target ads in turning switching a trigger in your head at a higher achievement rate. Yes..., they manipulate you.

Have you ever saw, Swiggy notifications getting personalized asking you to order Biryani/your most liked dish for your friend (mentioning a particular name), or estimating most probable action. They are just using local data and connected their app to a pre-trained Machine Learning Model. They are so good at estimating your next move, such that some of their models are running on more than 4000 focal points of data. Those models are available for every other app to get themselves integrated.

The captions from 'Chai pe Chercha' to 'Let's make America Great Again' all are just captured from analyzing the data warehouses created by the chats. Their impact is so heavy so that we can't even imagine the damages incurred due to the abusive usage of the data specifically accessed to some people. The colors you see in the videos from the social media handle to the portrayal and use of words are decided based on the extensive research on the same. On my next blog you get to know more about how the data is used in much more clear and defined way.

Let me end it here, what you can do to counter it?

Start being counter intuitive, just take a deep breathe and give it a thought what affected you, before arriving at a buying decision or a voting decision.

Any good search engines in lieu of google - Yes, use DuckDuckGo - Privacy focused search engine

Any good email systems - Yes, use Proton Mail - Privacy focused Mailing.