However, this has been known about for a long time, as also has that so many people encourage it by having little or no sense of personal privacy and security. They can't complain if they are inundated with real advertisements and fraud attempts if they insist on turning their whole lives over to "smart-'phones" and suchlike. (Are their home addresses, hexadecimal?)
What is more worrying to me is not that these systems exist to make money by data-harvesting. We know they do, and after all, no-one needs use Facebook, TikTok, so-called "smart"-'speakers and supermarkets' so-called "loyalty" or (dafter-named still, "club") cards. If you choose to use these, you choose to sacrifice at least some privacy. I don't, and I also keep my Internet transactions to the minimum and then as far as possible from known retailers unlikely to interest the data-harvesters. Nor do I bank on-line, and won't for as long as I can still reach a physical bank building.
I am far more concerned with companies like banks and insurers selling our details, without our permission or knowledge; despite strong data-protection laws that work even down to amateur club level. We have far less control over these companies, but can at least abjure TikTok, FB, Alexa, etc.
Their, and the social-media companies', primary customers are big-name-big-chain retailers and major advertising companies. That alone is irritating but only dangerous if their own data-security is easily breached by criminals - as does happen, and too often. Also, despite their 1984 attitudes at home, I very much doubt the Chinese government is at all interested in we ordinary citizens in a foreign land, unless something in our professional lives may make them so.
Nevertheless, as that article says, there is no proper control over the data and we do not know where else they are sold and re-sold. That the data are stored in China is worrying but I think the real problem is that they are stored at all, for no benefit to us, so it would not greatly matter if the servers are in Beijing, Bangkok, Baltimore or Blackpool.
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I remember one of the first warnings about Facebook came not long after it was launched - more than ten years ago now?
A student went wailing to the Press about she and several others having been reprimanded for bad public behaviour bringing themselves and possibly the university into disrepute. They had been out celebrating exams being over, and some of their high-jinks over-stepped the mark. She had posted images of this, openly, on FB, and was most upset that the university authorities had seen them.
"They had no right to look at my Facebook posts!" she moaned. Sorry my dear, but they do. One might have thought attending a university a sign of high intellect and the ability to think rationally. Evidently not in this student of law!
The BBC reported this, but looked further by also interviewing an IT security specialist. He explained that Facebook is a public, non-anonymous forum; and she was not the only to have come unstuck by their own misuse of it: employers or potential ones will also examine your social-media use.
Yes and there is a lot of data. So much that that for the average person it means probably nothing.
Let them know about me m. what can they do
Now my Friends family neighbors and coworkers knowing all that stuff I would not like. And America knows a lot about us too.
I understand that Walmart has facial recognition as soon as you walk in the door. Walmart probably knows everybody what we buy. What’s in our bank accounts they know where we live they know how much money we make.
