IT Blog

 There is a curious trend afoot these days. As profits among tech’s biggest players have risen, so too have the number of breaches and hacks. Their trajectories nearly mirror each other: up, and to the right.

This is no coincidence, of course. User data, that digital treasure craved by hackers and businesses alike, is wildly lucrative. Big tech is using our data in privacy-invasive ways to source targeted ads, selling precise user profiles to advertisers at exorbitant rates in a way that allows them to discriminate against users based on where they live or who they are. In addition, companies are using our images to train biased facial recognition systems, which tie into predictive policing and can unjustly put people in jail. For hackers, data can be held ransom or manipulated for financial gain. For users? These days most of our online data is sold, manipulated, stolen, or in many cases all of the above. Often we’re left with annoying ads that…