Predictive Analysis and Big Data

I blame Wolfpack Students and Buzzfeed for the majority of data that businesses/corporations, politicians, and non-profits collect on me. I think that I, like many people, to a certain extent evade businesses. I am fairly conservative politically, which makes me a minority on a college campus. However, I like to educate myself on what the “other side” thinks. I often read fairly liberal articles I glean from Wolfpack Students and do a lot of research on democratic candidates. This year especially I have been actively searching democratic candidates because Trump is the forerunner for the Republican candidacy and I could never live myself if I voted for him. For this reason, I often see a lot of information about the democratic party pop up, which I don’t always click on or use.

However, I really like to read human interest articles. Especially Buzzfeed articles that are packed full of jokes, puns and life advice. I am always seeing more human interest articles pop up during my time online and I love it and usually spend another 15 minutes distracted from my work.

I already knew how targeted companies can be with online advertisements since I work in marketing and I often create targeted ads. At the end of the day, I think it’s good to be aware of how much data companies can collect on you and I think we should think about things before we post them online. Regardless it doesn’t make me wary of advertisements and products that are shown on my browser. Companies pay a lot of money for targeted ads and if they care enough to put money and effort into their advertisement then more then likely they will have a quality product or service.

I didn’t learn too much from my Google data download, although I chose not to download my search history. I think the most interesting part for me was looking at my Youtube search history. It’s read how they have the exact date and time that I looked up certain things. I watch a lot of really random music videos on Youtube so I think it would be hard to make inferences about me using this data; however, if Google showed me some concert advertisements I would probably buy tickets to a concert.