Data Privacy and Tracking

Data privacy, also called information privacy, deals with the aptitude a group or individual has to define what data in a computer system can be shared with third parties. Tracking comes in as a part of this where a person can actually be followed by companies or individuals on the internet, or the World Wide Web, can track what websites you go to, pages you visit on these websites, or if you are shopping, what items you are looking at to buy. There is a whole business that is defined to finding what pages you go to and what items you look at on shopping websites and it creates ads onto any other pages that you look at that are unrelavent to what you are searching.

People's Knowledge
It is very important for everyone to know that data privacy and tracking is not all bad. There can be good things that come out of it when searching the web. Only 55% of people that are on the internet have tried to avoid specific people, organizations, or the government from observing what they do on the internet. People are trying, and have gotten better about their attempt to be anonymous online. "86% of internet users have taken steps online to remove or mask their digital footprints." It can help you with searching the internet. It can also be bad, for example, by tagging your GPS location to an image.

Metadata
Data privacy and tracking includes metadata, which can be a dangerous thing when you want to keep information private from the web. If you have ever tagged a photo on Facebook or Twitter with a person or what is in the photo itself, it can add metadata to the picture. Taking pictures on your cell phone can add all sorts of metadata to the photo. Metadata is also in mp3 files and can be in pdf files as well.

Companies and Organizations
There are so many different ways that data privacy and tracking can occur. However, not only is the occurence of it that needs to be brought to attention, but also the companies involved in ad tracking and search engine companies that invade our privacy to "help" us. Big name companies such as Microsoft and Google, just to name a few, are involved in data privacy and tracking.