Data Collection Relating to Personal Information and Purchase Behaviours – a Consumer Perspective

As human beings and citizens of the world, everyone values their privacy. It is a right that is often looked over and taken for granted by most. Since the beginning of time, there have been concerns about individuals’ rights to privacy and their personal information remaining confidential. Our founding fathers had concerns about this which is why, “…this right has developed into

Modern Americans see privacy as one of the greatest freedoms. When Edward Snowden revealed the NSA surveillance program, the citizens of the United States were appalled by the extent of access the NSA had to personal information. However, according to Dan Tapscott in his essay, “Should We Ditch the Idea of Privacy?” we post just as many details daily on our numerous social media outlets. The majority of the information we freely post is not meaningful and does no harm to us by being public, yet there is a dangerous side to our open-book nature.

Privacy is what allows people to feel secure in their surroundings. With privacy, one is allowed to withhold or distribute the information they want by choice, but the ability to have that choice is being violated in today’s society. Benjamin Franklin once said, “He who sacrifices freedom or liberty will eventually have neither.” And that’s the unfortunate truth that is and has occurred in recent years. Privacy, especially in such a fast paced moving world, is extremely vital yet is extremely violated, as recently discovered the NSA has been spying on U.S. citizens for quite a while now; based on the Fourth Amendment, the risk of leaked and distorted individual information, as well as vulnerability to lack of anonymity.

As Americans citizens privacy is a fundamental Human Right and its concerning when our rights are violated.

Data Collection is a piece that was done in 2009 by a man named Dave Kemp. Dave Kemp is an artist who looks at the connections between art, science, and technology. He tries to understand how these fields shape our perception of the world we live in today. This piece was a collection of photographs taken of identification cards such as driver’s licenses, student cards, and other cards with personal information. This was done to 100 different people and then shown in an art gallery. The pictures were displayed in a 1:1 scale and it allowed viewers to see every bit of information on the cards. The goal of Data Collection was to challenge privacy, and bring awareness to the importance of personal information by doing the opposite and exposing

Understanding consumer behaviour is essential to succeed in business. As Solomon et al. (2013) stresses, businesses exist to satisfy consumer’s needs. By identifying and understanding the factors that influences their customers, firms have the opportunity to develop a more efficient strategy, marketing message and advertising campaigns that is more in line with the needs and ways of thinking of their target consumers (Perreau, 2015).

The article “Mapping, and Sharing, the Consumer Genome” is about companies (mainly Acxiom) that access information on consumers from third party sources to provide other companies a basis to market items to that consumer. The author, Natasha Singer, is arguing that Acxiom and other companies like it need to have more transparency, like the ability to see your own profile, and revealing other privacy issues (security). She has an abundance of good points and supporting details. This topic is important because these companies basically go unregulated giving them the freedom to do almost anything they please to do. The information can be sensitive basically painting a red target on these companies for hackers. This impacts people currently because the information that people may see as private information could very well already be in a data base somewhere used to sell you products.

It is quite cheap and fairly easy to accumulate thorough information about people because of the advances in computer technology. This can prove to be beneficial for law enforcement looking to track down criminals; prevention of fraud within banks, and consumers becoming more educated about new products and services. However, this also creates opportunity for misuse of such information.

Privacy either encourages or is a necessary factor of human securities and fundamental value such as human embarrassment, independence, distinctiveness, freedom, and public affection. Being completely subject to mutual scrutiny will begin to lose self-respect, independence, distinctiveness, and freedom as a result of the sometimes strong burden to conform to public outlooks.

Personal data is quickly becoming a commodity in today's high technology world. This information is used by banks, investment and brokerage companies, credit card merchants, government agencies (local, state and federal), and consumer product-based companies. Most people probably don't realize the amount of information that's shared between companies, or how often it's done. Many companies sell and share customer data to help sell products and find out what new products they should produce. Other uses include gathering information about inventory levels to help better determine what types of products are bought at which store, when and how often. This can be used for inventory and production, to make sure that the store (or

In the modern world there have been a lot of technological advances within societies. Technology concerns about security and surveillance has changed the thoughts of people. This surveillance technology consist of spying video cameras, CCTV security and surveillance cameras, surveillance electronic communications, face recognition and many others. Some people think this technology is okay while others carry a different view.  These people feel that it is an invasion of privacy, especially when it is in a public place. Use of surveillance technology are impinging on our privacy as they are affecting student moral, privacy at workplace, behavior of people, life

The use of relational database technology, such as Structured Query Language (SQL) and Query by Example (QBE), in marketing has expanded business between the seller and the consumer like never before: “Database technology has opened the

Data mining can aid direct marketers by providing them with useful and accurate trends about

The media, trade bodies and academia has created a large buzz around the Data Protection and customers’ privacy in the recent years. The consequences of the issue raised are different legislation policies, self-regulation, and general confusion. In order to be discussed, this controversial topic should be looked at from two different perspectives: customers’ one and direct marketers’ one. From customers’ point of view, direct marketing is undoubtedly an invasion of their privacy. Consumers feel intimidated by the direct marketing campaigns that ‘fire’ them with different types of unwanted printed and online media daily. Further, many of them are being concerned about their personal information being so easily available which makes them feel vulnerable. On the other side are direct marketers who put a lot of effort in their attempts to engage the audience and build/maintain relationships with them. Moreover, practitioners believe that they are targeting the best prospects and best customers (rather than uninterested people) who are willing to buy the products offered and are happy to receive up-to-date information about them. Thus, it has been assumed that marketers see themselves as assistants who help people in choosing the best deals available whereas customers feel like victims rather than catered for.

The ability to see other’s pictures, comments, and other personal information, makes privacy a major issue. People no longer have private lives, because everybody post his personal information on the internet,