{"id":193,"date":"2016-01-20T15:11:31","date_gmt":"2016-01-20T20:11:31","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/eiq.knx.mybluehost.me\/website_78d26930\/bigdatacourse?p=193"},"modified":"2016-01-24T17:00:49","modified_gmt":"2016-01-24T22:00:49","slug":"constantly-connected","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/jjsylvia.com\/bigdatacourse\/constantly-connected\/","title":{"rendered":"Constantly Connected"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"facebook<\/a><\/span><\/p>\n

A typical day for me involves avoiding eye contact with strangers by constantly using my phone to check my texts, email, Facebook, and Pinterest while also listening to Spotify. All of these apps obviously contribute a lot to big data by revealing my correspondances, location, education, interests, activities, and preferences. Before beginning this course and learning about big data, I had never considered how accessible all of this information really is and how much it reveals about myself and everyone around me. <\/span><\/p>\n

I\u2019ve noticed for instance that my friend Juliann pins pictures of flowers and wedding dresses, which makes sense considering that she has recently become engaged. I on the other hand, mostly pin dessert recipes, pictures of tattoos that I\u2019ll never get, and humorous images, which probably suggests that I\u2019m a young college student. And while I don\u2019t post often on Facebook, I have included my interests and academic history into the \u201cabout me\u201d section, which shows me as a young, female, college student. I can see that Facebook is taking advantage of its awareness of my demographic because of all of its ads are geared towards selling me trendy clothing, internship opportunities, and amazon textbooks. Facebook also seems very aware of my location at all times, perhaps because I have the app on my gps-linked phone, or maybe because of the events that I say I\u2019m going to through the site. I can see that they are aware of this because the \u201ctrending\u201d portion of the website usually includes at least one story from the area in which I happen to be. <\/span><\/p>\n

And if Facebook knows my location, then Google surely does as well. As a French major I often use wordreference.com, and a quick glance to the side of the page will show me an advertisement for houses in Cary, NC and car dealerships. Still this is odd to me because if Google knows that I live near Cary, then they should probably also know by now that I am a French major and definitely don\u2019t have the money to be buying a house or a car. <\/span><\/p>\n

I\u2019m fairly creeped out by how much these huge companies know about me, but I still continue to use their services because they have become so ingrained in my life and the lives of my friends and family that I don\u2019t really feel like I can just stop using them altogether. And as uncomfortable as it is, I am fascinated by how clever these companies are about using their knowledge of me for their advertisements. Although as evidenced by Google\u2019s attempts to advertise to me, their systems aren\u2019t perfect. Their advertisements are targeting the rather large demographic I belong to, but they have yet to become specific enough to actually interest me. This makes me wonder how much more sophisticated advertising will become as companies use big data more and more carefully to target customers more individually. In the future, will smaller business even be able to compete without the information of big data? <\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

A typical day for me involves avoiding eye contact with strangers by constantly using my phone to check my texts, email, Facebook, and Pinterest while also listening to Spotify. All of these apps obviously contribute a lot to big data by revealing my correspondances, location, education, interests, activities, and preferences. Before beginning this course and
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